A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (83 page)

Will

The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it.The U.S. policies crafted in response to each case of genocide examined in this book were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by this country's most influential decisionmakers after unspoken and explicit weighing of costs and benefits.

In each case, U.S. policymakers in the executive branch (usually with the passive backing of most members of Congress) had two objectives. First, they wanted to avoid engagement in conflicts that posed little threat to American interests, narrowly defined. And second, they hoped to contain the political costs and avoid the moral stigma associated with allowing genocide. By and large, they achieved both aims. In order to contain the political fallout, U.S. officials overemphasized the ambiguity of the facts. They played up the likely futility, perversity, and jeopardy of any proposed intervention. They steadfastly avoided use of the word "genocide," which they believed carried with it a legal and moral (and thus political) imperative to act. And they took solace in the normal operations of the foreign policy bureaucracy, which permitted an illusion of continual deliberation, complex activity, and intense concern. One of the most important conclusions I have reached, therefore, is that the U.S. record is not one of failure. It is one of success. Troubling though it is to acknowledge, U.S. officials worked the system and the system worked.

To understand why the United States did not do more to stem genocide, it is not enough, of course, to focus on the actions of presidents or their foreign policy teams. In a democracy even an administration disinclined to act can be pressured into doing so. This pressure can come from inside or outside. Bureaucrats within the system who grasp the stakes can patiently lobby or brazenly agitate in the hope of forcing their bosses to entertain a full range of options. Unfortunately, although every genocide generated some activism within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, civil and foreign servants typically heeded what they took to be presidential indifference and public apathy. They assumed U.S. policy was immutable, that their concerns were already understood by their superiors, and that speaking (or walking) out would only reduce their capacity to improve the policy. Bosnia was the sole genocide of the twentieth century that generated a wave of resignations from the U.S. government. It is probably not coincidental that this was the one case where the protests of the foreign servants were bolstered daily by sustained public and press protest outside Foggy Bottom.

The executive branch has also felt no pressure from the second possible source: the home front. American leaders have been able to persist in turning away because genocide in distant lands has not captivated senators, congressional caucuses, Washington lobbyists, elite opinion shapers, grassroots groups, or individual citizens. The battle to stop genocide has thus been repeatedly lost in the realm of domestic politics. Although isolated voices have protested the slaughter, Americans outside the executive branch were largely mute when it mattered. As a result of this society-wide silence, officials at all levels of government calculated that the political costs of getting involved in stopping genocide far exceeded the costs of remaining uninvolved. The exceptions that have proven the rule were the ratification of the genocide convention after Reagan's Bitburg debacle and the NATO air campaign in Bosnia after Senate majority leader Bob Dole united with elite and grassroots activists to make President Clinton feel he was "getting creamed" for allowing Serb atrocities.

With foreign policy crises all over the world affecting more traditional U.S. interests, genocide has never secured top-level attention on its own merits. It takes political pressure to put genocide on the map in Washington. When Alison Des Forges of Human Rights Watch met with National Security Adviser Anthony Lake two weeks into the Rwanda genocide, he informed her that the phones were not ringing. "Make more noise!" he urged. Because so little noise has been made about genocide, U.S. decisionmakers have opposed U.S. intervention, telling themselves that they were doing all they could-and, most important, all they should-in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was domestically "possible" for the United States to do.

In the end, however, the inertia of the governed can not be disentangled from the indifference of the government. American leaders have both a circular and a deliberate relationship to public opinion. It is circular because their constituencies are rarely if ever aroused by foreign crises, even genocidal ones, in the absence of political leadership, and yet at the same time U.S. officials continually cite the absence of public support as grounds for inaction. The relationship is deliberate because American lead ership has not been absent in such circumstances: It has been present but devoted mainly to minimizing public outrage.

Accountability

One mechanism for altering the calculus of U.S. leaders would be to make them publicly or professionally accountable for inaction. U.S. officials fear repercussions for their sins of commission--for decisions they make and policies they shape that go wrong. But none fear they will pay a price for their sins of omission. If everyone within the government is motivated to avoid "another Somalia" or "another Vietnam," few think twice about playing a role in allowing "another Rwanda."

Other countries and institutions whose personnel were actually present when genocide was committed have undertaken at least some introspec- tion.The Netherlands, France, and the UN have staged inquiries into their responsibility for the fall of Srebrenica and the massacres that followed. But when the UN's investigators approached the U.S. mission in NewYork for assistance, their phone calls were not returned. In the end the UN team was forbidden from making any independent contact with U.S. government employees.The investigators were granted access to a group of handpicked junior and midlevel officials who revealed next to nothing about what U.S. officials knew during the Srebrenica massacres.

The French, the Belgians, the UN, and the OAU have staged investigations on their roles in the Rwanda genocide. But in the United States, when some disgruntled members of the Congressional Black Caucus attempted to stage hearings on the part the U.S. played (or failed to play), they were rebuffed. Two officials in the Clinton administration, one at the National Security Council, the other at the State Department, conducted internal studies on the administration's response to the Rwanda slaughter. But they examined only the paper trail and did not publicly disclose their findings.The United States needs congressional inquiries with the power to subpoena documents and to summon U.S. officials of all ranks in the executive and legislative branches. Without meaningful disclosure, public awareness, and official shame, it is hard to imagine the U.S. response improving the next time around.

Even nongovernmental attempts at accountability might make a difference. In September 2001, the Atlantic Monthly published the results of my three-year investigation into the Clinton administration's response to the genocide in Rwanda. A few weeks later, according to officials on the National Security Council, a memo made its way to the desk of President George W. Bush on the subject of genocide prevention. The memo summarized the findings of the Atlantic article and warned of the likely outbreak of ethnic violence in Burundi. During the presidential campaign the previous year, Bush had said stopping genocide was not America's business. "I don't like genocide and I don't like ethnic cleansing," Bush had told Sam Donaldson ofABC, "but I would not send our troops."' After being elected and being presented with an account of the Clinton administration's failure, however, Bush wrote in firm letters in the margin of the memo: "NOT ON MY WATCH." While he was commander in chief, he was saying, genocide would not recur.

Bush's note certainly constituted a welcome statement of intent, but the president was in fact falling back into line with the other American presidents who pledged "never again." In order to put the sentiment into action, he would have to make meaningful public and bureaucratic commitments to stop genocide. He and his top foreign policy aides would need to issue an explicit presidential decision directive, rally support in their speeches, and demand the preparation of "off-the-shelf" contingency military planning. Otherwise, it is highly unlikely that U.S. officials or citizens would behave differently the next time ethnic chauvinists begin systematically wiping out a minority group. In any event, on September 11, 2001, just days after the president jotted his marginalia, Islamic terrorists turned four American civilian airliners into human fuel bombs, murdering more than 3,000 civilians, shattering the nation's sense of invulnerability, and causing the president to focus U.S. resources on a long-term "war on terrorism."

The Future

The September 11 attack on the United States will of course alter U.S. foreign policy. The attack might enhance the empathy of Americans inside and outside government toward peoples victimized by genocide. The fanatics who target the United States resemble the perpetrators of genocide in their espousal of collective responsibility of the most savage kind. They target civilians not because of anything they do personally but because of who they are. To earn a death sentence, it was enough in the twentieth century to be an Armenian, a Jew, or a Tutsi. On September 11, it was enough to be an American. In 1994 Rwanda, a country of just 8 million, experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days. On an American scale this would mean 23 million people murdered in three months. When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out, by contrast, every country in the world turned away.

Even if Americans become better able to imagine slaughter and identify with its victims, the U.S. government is likely to view genocide prevention as an undertaking it can not afford as it sets out to better protect Americans. Many are now arguing, understandably, that fighting terrorism means husbanding the country's resources and avoiding humanitarian intervention, which is said to harm U.S. "readiness" The Kosovo intervention and the Milosevic trial, once thought to mark important precedents, may come to represent high-water marks in genocide prevention and punishment.

This would be a tragic and ultimately self-defeating mistakeThe United States should stop genocide for two reasons.The first and most compelling reason is moral. When innocent life is being taken on such a scale and the United States has the power to stop the killing at reasonable risk, it has a duty to act. It is this belief that motivates most of those who seek intervention. But history has shown that the suffering of victims has rarely been sufficient to get the United States to intervene.

Thus, even those driven by a sense of America's moral responsibility have tried to make the case by appealing to the second reason: enlightened self-interest. They warned that allowing genocide undermined regional and international stability, created militarized refugees, and signaled dictators that hate and murder were permissible tools of statecraft. Because these threats to U.S. interests were long-term dangers and not immediately apparent, however, they rarely swayed top U.S. policymakers. Genocide did undermine regional stability, but the destabilized areas tended to lie outside the U.S. sphere of concern. Refugees were militarized, but they tended not to wash up on America's shores. Dictators everywhere were signaled, but how they treated their own citizens was seen to have little impact on American military or economic security. Thus humanitarian intervention came about only on the rare occasions when the shorter term political interests of U.S. policymakers were at stake.

If it was difficult before September 11 to get U.S. decision-makers to see the long-term costs of allowing genocide, it will be even harder today when U.S. security needs are so acute and visible. But security for Americans at home and abroad is contingent on international stability, and there is perhaps no greater source of havoc than a group of well-armed extremists bent on wiping out a people on ethnic, national, or religious grounds.

Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter. States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable. Hitler began by persecuting his own people and then waged war on the rest of Europe and, in time, the United States. Saddam Hussein wiped out rural Kurdish life and then turned on Kuwait, sending his genocidal henchman Ali Hassan alMajid to govern the newly occupied country. The United States now has reason to fear that the poisonous potions Hussein tried out on the Kurds will be used next on Americans. Milosevic took his wars from Slovenia and Croatia to Bosnia and then Kosovo. The United States and its European allies are continuing to pay for their earlier neglect of the Balkans by having to grapple with mounting violence in Macedonia that threatens the stability of southeastern Europe.

Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism, and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats. In Bosnia, where the United States and Europe maintained an arms embargo against the Muslims, extremist Islamic fighters and proselytizers eventually turned up to offer succor. Some secular Muslim citizens became radicalized by the partnership, and the failed state of Bosnia became a haven for Islamic terrorists shunned elsewhere in the world. It appears that one of the organizations that infiltrated Bosnia in its hour of need and used it as a training base was Saudi terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda.`