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Some members of the British media play by different rules than the American press and that was Samantha Power's undoing. The brilliant Harvard Professor and journalist who specializes in preventing genocide and building models of non-violence in situations of conflict talked off the record, but the UK journalist saw a scoop and published comments about Hillary Clinton that were inappropriate as public statements.

Powers is a compelling, detailed, eloquent writer and thinker about how the United States has generally failed to intervene in genocidal situations, primarily because our government leaders feel that we have nothing to "gain" by doing so. One just need to think back to Rwanda as a recent example of America doing nothing to stop an African Holocaust.

This book is a testament to the type of advisors Obama has assembled, and it is a great loss that she had to quit the campaign because of something she said off the record -- after demands by the Clinton campaign.

The paperback version of this 688-page vitally important book was published in September of 2007.

From the New Yorker:

In the wake of the Holocaust, United States policymakers have been rhetorically committed to the idea of preventing genocide, and yet they have consistently failed to back up their words with actions. Although Power begins her magisterial chronicle of failure with the Turkish extermination of the Armenians during the First World War, she concentrates on America's recent reluctance to intervene in the mass slaughter of civilians in Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda. She argues that had the U.S. done so—particularly in Bosnia and Rwanda—it could have averted the murder of tens or hundreds of thousands; instead, geopolitical considerations, indifference, and worries over domestic support trumped American ideals. Though clearly imbued with a sense of outrage, Power is judicious in her portraits of those who opposed intervention, and keenly aware of the perils and costs of military action. Her indictment of U.S. policy is therefore all the more damning.

From Publishers Weekly:

Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915-1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian "ethnic cleansing," and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate.

The emotional force of Power's argument is carried by moving, sometimes almost unbearable stories of the victims and survivors of such brutality. Her analysis of U.S. politics what she casts as the State Department's unwritten rule that nonaction is better than action with a PR backlash; the Pentagon's unwillingness to see a moral imperative; an isolationist right; a suspicious left and a population unconcerned with distant nations aims to show how ingrained inertia is, even as she argues that the U.S. must reevaluate the principles it applies to foreign policy choices. In the face of firsthand accounts of genocide, invocations of geopolitical considerations and studied and repeated refusals to accept the reality of genocidal campaigns simply fail to convince, she insists. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. Prominent among those who made a difference are Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who invented the word genocide and who lobbied the U.N. to make genocide the subject of an international treaty, and Senator William Proxmire, who for 19 years spoke every day on the floor of the U.S. Senate to urge the U.S. to ratify the U.N. treaty inspired by Lemkin's work. This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action.

From an online reviewer:

In reading the introduction to this terrific book by Harvard professor Samantha Powers, I was reminded of a comment made by one of my own professors in graduate school eons ago to the effect that public morality provides for disastrous foreign policy. What he meant, of course, was that trying to conduct the political affairs of a sovereign state based on one's perceptions of what we believe to be right and wrong is most ussually a terrible idea. In fact, he said, one must eschew the temptation to do so in favor of a more "enlightened' understanding of one's strategic national interest. In other words, realpolitik in the real world is based on gaining and keeping advantage, not on doing what is morally right.
While we may not agree with such a cynical and throwaway attitude toward foreign policy, it is consistent with the historical documentation the author so aptly demonstrates in this well documented and well written exploration of the most vexing and curious phenomenon of the 20th century; state sponsored genocide. And while I would quarrel slightly with her voiced notion that it is a peculiarly modern phenomenon (witness our handy slaughter of the American Indian in a very methodical and painstaking fashion over a hundred year period), it can not be denied that the scope and depths of the commission of such mass murder has reached epidemic proportions since the turn of the century. This indeed is a issue of satanic dimensions, a so-called "Problem From Hell".

Those of us who are systematically engaged in the examination of modern warfare have often marveled at the uncanny ability of statesmen like Wilson, Roosevelt, and Churchill to deny any personal knowledge or complicity in the events surrounding the Armenian debacle in the early years of World War One or the Holocaust visited on the Jews, Gypsies, and others during the Nazi epoch. And, as time has gone by, more and more evidence indicating such leaders were indeed quite aware of the circumstances and yquite deliberately chose not to act is even more damning. The, too, when one starts to consider the more recent train of events in Bosnia, we too have become eye-witnesses to a consistent policy of inaction, to what can only be described as the colossal reluctance of either the American government or the European allies to act decisively to stem or stop the wanton genocidal behavior of the Bosnian Serbs. Less clear was the role of the American government in the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and in East Timor. Finally, it was painfully evident that William Jefferson Clinton was extremely reluctant to act to force the Serbian government from its bloody incursion into Kosovo.

Thus, in each case-study that the author provides, the same lack of national resolve is indicated, and the consistencies from administration to administration seems to indicate it is a pattern shared by both Democrat and Republicans while in power. It is instructive at this point to remember that most often our military actions are usually confined to extending the national government's foreign policy through extraordinary means, i.e., forcing a situation in which our perceived national interest is threatened by a change in the status quo. Genocide rarely so affects our interests. In fact, it is often our friends in power who are more likely to be the perpetrators in a genocidal situation. Proof of this is our lack of concern over Saddam's massacre of Kurds when he was considered our "bulwark' against Iran in the late 1980s. Then he made the fatal mistake of putting our oil supply at risk by invading Kuwait. At that point, we acted. Wow, what a surprise!

In summary, we should not be intellectually surprised by the lack of morality involved in public decision-making when it comes to the conduct of foreign affairs. We rarely do the "right" thing, but rather do the "smart" thing in terms of what we perceive will best serve our global economic and political goals. In such a world, public morality plays no significant part, and it is only when the media turns on the bright lights of public exposure that authorities will finally act. This is a terrific book, one that deserves a careful and meticulous read. But don't realistically expect to find any solutions for our baleful "realpolitik" lapses in public morality, or that things are likely to change in the future. The powers that be couldn't care less about murder and mayhem, as long as it doesn't affect their perceived national interests. It isn't even on their radar screens. Enjoy.



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