Samantha Power on Foriegn Policy

Conversation with Samantha Power, p. 4 of 5

This is an almost two-year old interview with Samantha Power back when her book, "A Problem From Hell" was fresh on the bookshelves. There's five parts of the interview online, but there's a few quotes that still warrant highlighting as we shift attention on Darfur:

You're suggesting that oftentimes it would take very little to stop the genocide. In this particular case, the Canadian general [Dallaire] has said that if he had had a few thousand more troops, he could have stopped them, and if he had been allowed to stay. In this particular genocide, also, you talk about we could have jammed the radios that were giving the orders and so on.

As I read the book and I listen to you, I think one of the elements that helps us understand why we refuse to act is the weight of history. So in the case of the Clinton administration, they were burned by taking over the engagement in Somalia, and the incident now portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down occurred on their watch. And so the notion that we might lose some American lives was more important in the scales and had actually come to define the administration's policies towards certain parts of the world.

Yes, "there's always something." In fact, there are always many more good reasons not to get involved than to get involved. The only reason to get involved is a moral reason, really. At least that's how it's experienced at the time. It turns out there are actually very good national security reasons to get involved, too, in that allowing this kind of hate, and legitimizing this kind of genocide as a tool of statecraft, usually comes back to haunt us. Given that we allowed the Bosnian Muslims to die for the first half of the 1990s, it's not a surprise to hear, though it was very disappointing to hear, that bin Laden got in there and traveled for the better part of the last decade on a Bosnian passport. Similarly, Saddam, who you mentioned, used chemical weapons against the Kurds in 1987, and yet we were giving him substantial economic aid at the time, in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, Sr. The chemical weapons that he tested out on the Kurds that we refused to denounce -- indeed we doubled our aid program to him the following year -- these are the very chemicals we're now afraid he's going to use against American citizens.

So there are long-term security risks, but the short-term imperative is a moral imperative. As you say, that's on one side of the ledger. And morality doesn't go very far in Washington. If you start talking about values, you're not going to get invited to the next meeting, for the most part. You have to be very careful. So everybody is trying to make these long-term systemic interest reasons, even if they're motivated by more inspiration.

On the other side of the ledger are these things that have just happened in history. So in the case of Cambodia, as Pol Pot is killing two million of his own people, we are completely haunted by Vietnam. In the case of Iraq, we are filtering everything Saddam does through our experience in 1979 in Iran, and feel like almost no matter what Saddam does, he's got to be better than them. Well, no, as a matter of fact, he really isn't better than them; I think we've learned that over time. With Rwanda, as you say, Black Hawk has just gone down.

The filtering, the tendency to fight the last war and process everything through the recent historical experience; all of that just means that there is a perception that there will be a cost to engagement. But fighting the last war, distorting the lessons of history and over-applying them, or applying them in the wrong context, without seeing what made particular historical circumstances unique, raises the perception that you will pay a price when you act. The real tragedy of the last hundred years is that politicians can, in good reasonable conscience, calculate that they will pay no price by doing nothing. You [can] see, "Oh, my God. That's what happened when we did that. And that's what happened when we did that," and you look back in history and [see that] nobody's ever paid an electoral price for allowing genocide.

The book is told through these upstanders, not the bystanders, but through these people who try to take a stand. A number of elections that have been lost by people who have, particularly, made stopping the genocide in Bosnia, their daily business. The voters penalize them. And look at Dallaire, the Canadian commander, the price that he has paid for taking a stand. Looking at the resignees -- more resignations over Bosnia than over Vietnam -- and the way that they were marginalized and demonized. When you're delivering the message to your higher-ups that genocide has to be stopped, you're going to be [attacked] on all fronts because it's not just delivering a message that nobody wants to hear because they don't agree with it, it's delivering a message that nobody wants to hear because it challenges their self-identity. The tendency is to unleash ferocious attacks against the people who stand up. So it's overall determined in favor of doing nothing.

What it would take to overcome that would be either presidential leadership, or the rest of the outside doing more, quicker, to create the perception that there would be a political cost to doing nothing.

This is very important, this point about how to educate the public, how to create the political basis for making genocide a real concern.

But let me understand a little more about these leaders. If we look at the Reagan and Bush administrations towards Saddam, one of the pressures there was domestic economic interest with regard to continuing aid, because the farm lobby wanted it and the manufacturers who were benefiting because Saddam was using our credits to buy their products. So political interests are sometimes at work. Now, you seem to be suggesting that this combination of political interests and short-term perspectives prevent [leaders] from seeing our long-term interests. Because you are suggesting, for example, that, looking at Bosnia, if Secretary of State Baker had not said, "We don't have any dogs in that fight," very early in the process, then this whole genocide issues might never had arisen.

Yes. A stitch in time saves nine. The problem, though, of course, is that if something is prevented, we don't know, so nobody ever gets any credit for it. I think Kosovo is the best illustration of this. People who are critics of the Kosovo intervention (and I think that the majority is critical of the Kosovo intervention, so it's important to address that), should ask themselves, if we had listened to General Dallaire in Rwanda, who in January of 1994 sent a famous cable to Kofi Annan in New York, who was then the head of peacekeeping, saying, "The militias can exterminate at a rate of a thousand every twenty minutes"-- if we had listened to Dallaire and actually acted on that cable, instead of ignoring it as we did, and gone in -- like, let's say, the United States would have seen Somalia as being a case [of intervening] in time, and Rwanda as being something separate and important and potentially genocidal -- had we intervened preemptively, probably 500 civilians would have been killed, something like that, as in Kosovo. Probably Hutu would have been put on one side of the country, Tutsi on the other; and the ACLU and all the human rights groups would [object], and Dallaire would be seen as a crackpot, and none of us would ever know about the 800,000 [actually killed]. So there's a real structural problem, in that sense, as well.

Democratic administrations might be just a wee bit more likely to take the humanitarian concerns more seriously and to contemplate doing social work, let's say, domestically and abroad; while the Republicans are more capable of seeing good and evil, but eschew the notion that it's government's job to do social work. Then what Democratic administrations have to reckon with is the extent to which they will be criticized for intervening, because one of their most potent constituencies would say, "Never assume a good motive when a bad motive will do." The reality is that when intervention does come about -- I mean, military intervention, because there are lots of softer forms of intervention, as you mentioned, that I think should be employed -- but when military intervention happens, the critics come out in droves. [Intervention] is always motivated by values, yes, but marginally; you need something else. In the case of Bosnia, it was political interest, it was President Clinton's finally paying a domestic political price for doing nothing about Bosnia. He was seeing himself getting dragged in, regardless. I think he said, "Enough! I have to own this, I'm humiliated." That was domestic political interest, it wasn't mere humanitarianism.

Operation Provide Comfort, in Northern Iraq after the second Kurdish crisis -- not when Saddam was gassing his people, but after the Gulf War, when they rose up and were quashed -- there, Turkey called on the Bush administration and said, "You don't have a dog in this fight either, but help us. We do. We don't want a million Kurds in Southern Turkey." And there, our deference to that relationship and also the prior investment of American credibility in the region, such that when those Kurds came over, unlike the ones three years before, when they came across the border, that tragedy was Americanized, because we had just fought the Gulf War, and we were humiliated by the exodus.

So, again, there's always something else going on, and unsurprisingly, because it requires those other [interests], when intervention of any kind takes place, there's a tendency to assume that it's cynical and in service of other ends. What I would say is that it is in service of other ends, but that often it will still do more good than harm. We have to be prepared to throw some of our weight in the interest of saving people, to recognize that American leadership, unfortunately, remains essential in motivating multilateral interventions, in freeing up the UN to do what it should be doing. Indeed, even diplomatically, [we must use] the leverage and the strength of America's normative power, which [surprisingly] still exists, rather than bypass leadership. I've come to realize is that leadership is binary: when America doesn't lead, everyone else sees it as leadership not to act.

So in other words, if America doesn't act first, then they don't act.

It's been the pattern across time. No democratic country wants to do anything about this problem. So if they can point to the United States and say, "Well, the U.S. is blocking us," or "The U.S. doesn't want to do anything," or "Did you hear? The U.S. says it's a 'problem from hell,' it's not genocide." No sitting American president has ever used the word genocide to describe a genocide under way. But the same is true of Western European leaders, and the neighboring countries around these genocidal regimes. They're usually in bed or at war, or they have too many dogs in the fight, essentially. The United States is hardly alone, but everyone else can [then] point to American apathy or American powers of dissuasion, which is what happened in Rwanda: the United States tried to convince other countries not to act, and, indeed blocked them, because multilaterally, of course, the United States is going to pay for just about a third of whatever gets done. And so at that point, the U.S. is saying, "Not only do we not want to go, we don't want anyone else to go either. We don't want to get dragged in ? la Somalia," as you say, "and we don't want to pay."

The entire series is worth a read as well.