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Abstract
Drawing on U.S. government documents, private papers and numerous interviews, [Samantha Power] seeks to show that American policymakers have knowingly turned a blind eye to massacres. In her view, the United States' policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide has not been a failure but precisely what diplomats wanted. According to Power, the pattern of American diplomatic indolence was set during World War I In Turkey, where Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador, cabled back to Washington in July 1915 that a program of annihilation of the Armenian people was occurring. But Morgenthau's superiors remained coldly indifferent. The State Department declared, "However much we may deplore the suffering of the Armenians, we cannot take any active steps to come to their assistance at the present time." The United States wished to remain isolationist and had no desire to become embroiled in internal Turkish affairs. "Time and again," writes Power, "the U.S. government would be reluctant to cast aside its neutrality and formally denounce a fellow state for its atrocities." Indeed, the Turkish horrors set the stage for the Nazi Holocaust. As Hitler reportedly bragged to his henchmen, "Who remembers the Armenians?"
Focusing as she does on the humanitarian case for intervention, Power might have made more of the fact that it is often in the national interest of the United States to arrest the slide toward, or prosecution of, genocide. Bosnia, where Power limns the passivity and outright lies of Clinton administration officials, provides one case where Europe and the United States needed to stop the Serbs to prevent violence from spreading through southeastern Europe. But Iraq would perhaps have provided Power's most telling example. The equivocations and falsehoods that Power describes in Reagan and [Bush] administration policy toward Iraq are devastating. Though it has been consigned to the memory hole, the United States was quite partial to Saddam Hussein during his war against Iran. Despite Hussein's use of poison gas against the Iranians and, later, the Kurds, U.S. officials steadfastly insisted that the evidence was uncertain. Power correctly observes that the Bush administration also betrayed the Kurds during their uprising in 1991 by failing to support them against Hussein. She focuses on the grievous loss of life and the failure of American officials to ever seek to prosecute any Iraqis for their crimes.