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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/madar09102009.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/madar09102009.html<br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">September 10,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Care Tactics
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By CHASE MADAR
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">A</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>merican liberals rejoiced at Samantha Power’s
appointment to the National Security Council. After so many dreary
Clintonites were stacked into top State Department positionsDennis Ross,
Richard Holbrooke, Hillary herselfhere was new blood: a dynamic
idealist, an inspiring public intellectual, a bestselling author of a
book against genocide, a professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human
Rights. And she hasn’t even turned 40. The blogosphere buzzed. Surely
Samantha Power was the paladin, the conscience, the senior director for
multilateral affairs to bring human rights back into U.S. foreign
policy.<br><br>
Don’t count on it. “Human rights,” a term once coterminous with freeing
prisoners of conscience and documenting crimes against humanity, has
taken on a broader, more conflicted definition. It can now mean helping
the Marine Corps formulate counterinsurgency techniques; pounding the
drums for air strikes (of a strictly surgical nature, of course);
lobbying for troop escalations in various conquered nationsall for noble
humanitarian ends.<br><br>
The intellectual career of Samantha Power is a richly instructive example
of the weaponization of human rights. She made her name in 2002 with A
Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. In this surprise
global bestseller, she argues that when confronted with 20th-century
genocides, the United States sat on the sidelines as the blood flowed.
Look at Bosnia or Rwanda. “Why does the US stand so idly by?” she asks.
Powers allows that overall America “has made modest progress in its
responses to genocide.” That’s not good enough. We must be bolder in
deploying our armed forces to prevent human-rights catastrophesto engage
in “humanitarian intervention” in the patois of our foreign-policy
elite.<br><br>
In nearly 600 pages of text, Power barely mentions those postwar
genocides in which the U.S. government, far from sitting idle, took a
robust role in the slaughter. Indonesia’s genocidal conquest of East
Timor, for instance, expressly green-lighted by President Ford and
Secretary of State Kissinger, who met with Suharto the night before the
invasion was launched and carried out with American-supplied weapons.
Over the next quarter century, the Indonesian army saw U.S. military aid
and training rise as it killed between 100,000 and 200,000 East Timorese.
(The figures and the designation of “genocide” come from a UN-formed
investigative body.) This whole bloody business gets exactly one sentence
in Power’s book.<br><br>
What about the genocide of Mayan peasants in Guatemalaanother
decades-long massacre carried out with American armaments by a military
dictatorship with tacit U.S. backing, officer training at Fort Benning,
and covert CIA support? A truth commission sponsored by the Catholic
Church and the UN designated this programmatic slaughter genocide and set
the death toll at approximately 200,000. But apparently this isn’t a
problem from hell.<br><br>
The selective omissions compound. Not a word about the CIA’s role in
facilitating the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian
Communists in 1965-66. (Perhaps on legalistic grounds: Since it was a
political group being massacred, does it not meet the quirky criteria in
the flawed UN Convention on Genocide?) Nothing about the vital debate as
to whether the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths attributable to
U.S.-led economic sanctions in the 1990s count as genocide. The book is
primarily a vigorous act of historical cleansing. Its portrait of a
“consistent policy of non-intervention in the face of genocide” is
fiction. (Those who think that pointing out Power’s deliberate blind
spots about America’s active role in genocide is nitpicking should
remember that every moral tradition the earth has known, from the
Babylonian Talmud to St. Thomas Aquinas, sees sins of commission as far
worse than sins of omission.)<br><br>
Power’s willful historical ignorance is the inevitable product of her
professional milieu: the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard’s
Kennedy School of Government. One simply cannot hold down a job at the
KSG by pointing out the active role of the U.S. government in various
postwar genocides. That is the kind of impolitic whining best left to
youthful anarchists like Andrew Bacevich or Noam Chomsky and, really, one
wouldn’t want to offend the retired Guatemalan colonel down the hall.
(The KSG has an abiding tradition of taking on war criminals as visiting
fellows.) On the other hand, to cast the U.S. as a passive, benign giant
that must assume its rightful role on the world stage by vanquishing
evilthis is most flattering to American amour propre and consonant with
attitudes in Washington, even if it doesn’t map onto reality. A country
doesn’t acquire a vast network of military bases in dozens of sovereign
nations across the world by standing on the sidelines, and for the past
hundred years the U.S. has, by any standard, been a hyperactive world
presence.<br><br>
For Samantha Power, the United States can by its very nature only be a
force for virtue abroad. In this sense, the outlook of Obama’s
human-rights advocate is no different from Donald Rumsfeld’s.<br><br>
Power’s faith in the therapeutic possibilities of military force was
formed by her experience as a correspondent in the Balkans, whose wars
throughout the ’90s she seems to view as the alpha and omega of ethnic
conflict, indeed of all genocide. For her, NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in
1999 was a stunning success that “likely saved hundreds of thousands of
lives” in Kosovo. Yet this assertion seems to crumble a little more each
year: estimates of the number of Kosovars slain by the province’s Serb
minority have shrunk from 100,000 to at most 5,000. And it is far from
clear whether NATO’s air strikes prevented more killing or intensified
the bloodshed. Even so, it is the NATO attack on Belgradeincluding
civilian targets, which Amnesty International has recently, belatedly,
deemed a war crimethat informs Power’s belief that the U.S. military
possesses nearly unlimited capability to save civilians by means of
aerial bombardment, and all we need is the courage to launch the sorties.
Power has recently admitted, perhaps a little ruefully, that “the Kosovo
war helped build support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the
false impression that the US military was invincible.” But no
intellectual has worked harder than Samantha Power to propagate this
impression.<br><br>
A Problem From Hell won a Pulitzer in early 2003. America’s book
reviewers, eager to be team players, were relieved to be reminded of the
upbeat side of military force during the build-up to Operation Iraqi
Freedom. Surely Saddam Hussein, who had perpetrated acts of genocide
against the Kurds, needed to be smashed by military force. Didn’t we owe
it to the Iraqis to invade? Hasn’t America played spectator for too long?
Power, to her credit, did not support the war, but she has been mighty
careful not to raise her voice against it. After all, is speaking out at
an antiwar demonstration or joining a peace group like Code Pink really
“constructive”? It is certainly no way to get a seat on the National
Security Council.<br><br>
The failed marriage of warfare and humanitarian work is also the subject
of Power’s most recent book, Chasing the Flame, a biography of Sergio
Vieira de Mello, the UN humanitarian worker who was killed, with 21
others, by a suicide bomber in Baghdad just months after the U.S.
invasion. Most of the book is a sensitive and rather gripping account of
Vieira’s partial successes and heroic efforts in refugee resettlement in
Thailand, Lebanon, and the Balkans. He eventually rose to become the UN’s
high commissioner on human rightsa position he left when asked by George
W. Bush to lead a UN “presence” in Iraq. That the UN’s top human-rights
official would rush to help with the clean-up after an American invasion
that contravened international law may strike some observers as strange.
(One can imagine the puzzlement and outrage if the UN’s high commissioner
on human rights had trailed the Soviets into Afghanistan in 1979 to help
build civil society.) But for Vieira, and for Samantha Power, there is
nothing unseemly about human-rights professionals serving as adjuncts to
a conquering army, especially when the prestige of the UNscorned and
flouted during the run-up to the waris on the line. Besides, Vieira had
the personal assurances of the U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremera
simply charming American: he even speaks a foreign languagethat the UN
taskforce would have a great deal of sway in how a new Iraq was
built.<br><br>
In June 2003, Vieira arrived in Baghdad and was surprised to find himself
completely powerless. That Vieira and company believed the UN insignia
would be more than a hood ornament on Blackwater’s Humvees bespeaks not
tough-minded idealism but wishful thinking. Power herself claims that
Kofi Annan’s main reason for sending Vieira off to Baghdad was to remind
the world of the UN’s “relevance” by getting a piece of the action. But
for him and his colleagues, this confusion of means and ends proved
deadly, one of tens of thousands of blood-soaked tragedies that this war
has wrought. The clear lesson is that humanitarian work is always fatally
compromised if it’s part of a militarized pacification campaign: NGO
workers wield no real power and serve mostly as window dressing for the
conquering army.<br><br>
But this isn’t the moral that Power draws. She is still looking for Mr.
Good War. Today, her preferred human-rights adventure is an escalation of
the war in Afghanistan.<br><br>
For the past seven years Afghanistan has been the “right” war for
American liberals, but this carte blanche is fast expiring, as more
civilians and soldiers die, as the Taliban resurges, and as the carnage
whirlwinds into Pakistan. The numerous humanitarian nonprofits in
Afghanistan are no longer backed up by the military; it is they who are
backing the armed forces, having morphed into helpmeets to a
counterinsurgency campaign. This transformation has, according to one
knowledgeable veteran of such work in Afghanistan, rendered humanitarian
work unsustainable. But Power, like so many American liberals, remains
committed to “success” in Afghanistanwhatever that means.<br><br>
As a human-rights entrepreneur who is also a tireless advocate of war,
Samantha Power is not aberrant. Elite factions of the human-rights
industry were long ago normalized within the tightly corseted spectrum of
American foreign policy. Sarah Sewell, the recent head of the Carr Center
for Human Rights at Harvard, has written a slavering introduction to the
new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: human-rights
tools can help the U.S. armed forces run better pacification campaigns in
conquered territory. The Save Darfur campaign, more organized than any
bloc of the peace movement in the U.S., continues to call for some
inchoate military strike against Sudan (with Power’s vocal support) even
though this disaster’s genocide status is doubtful and despite an expert
consensus that bombing Khartoum would do less than nothing for the
suffering refugees. Meanwhile, the influential liberal think tank the
Center for American Progress also appeals to human rights in its call for
troop escalations in Afghanistanthe better to “engage” the
enemy.<br><br>
Nor is the imperialist current within the human-rights industry a purely
American phenomenon: the conquest of Iraq found whooping proponents in
Bernard Kouchner, founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, now Sarkozy’s
foreign minister, and Michael Ignatieff, also a former head of the
Harvard’s Carr Center and poised to become Canada’s next prime minister.
Gareth Evans, Australia’s former foreign minister and a grinning
soft-peddler of Indonesia’s massacres in East Timor, is perhaps the
leading intellectual proponent of the Responsibility to Protect, or R2P
as it is cutely called, an attempt to embed humanitarian intervention
into international law. Evans, who recently stepped down from leading the
International Crisis Group, laments the Iraq War chiefly for the way it
has soiled the credibility of his pet idea.<br><br>
To be sure, the human-rights industry is not all armed missionaries and
laptop bombardiers. Human Rights Watch, for example, is one of few
prestigious institutions in the U.S. to have criticized Israel’s assault
on Gaza, for which its Middle East and North Africa division has endured
much bashing not just from right-wing media but from its own board of
directors. That said, HRW’s rebuke was limited to Israel’s manner of
making war, rather than Israel’s decision to launch the attack in the
first placethe jus in bello, not the jus ad bellum.<br><br>
Human-rights organizations can do a splendid job of exposing and
criticizing abuses, but they are constitutionally incapable of taking
stands on larger political issues. No major human-rights NGO opposed the
invasion of Iraq. With their legitimacy and funding dependent on a
carefully cultivated perception of neutrality, human-rights nonprofits
will never be any substitute for an explicitly anti-imperialist political
force. In the meantime, America’s best and brightest will continue to
explore innovative ways for human rights to serve a thoroughly
militarized foreign policy.<br><br>
<b>Chase Madar</b> is a translator of
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cursed-Poets-Green-Integer/dp/1931243158/">
Verlaine</a> and
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Exterminating-Angel-Green-Integer-Books/dp/1931243360/">
Buñuel</a> and a civil rights lawyer in New York. He can be reached at
<a href="mailto:chasemadar@hotmail.com">chasemadar@hotmail.com</a><br><br>
<i>This article originally appeared in
<a href="http://www.amconmag.com/">The American Conservative</a>.
<br><br>
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