Two Perspectives on Genocide

This debate (one, two, three) about Barack Obama and genocide between Hilzoy and Jamie Kirchick over at Andrew's site reminds me of a broader point I've been meaning to make forever.

When you look at different takes on the Darfur situation, you see them divided into two main camps. On the one hand, you have people who are interested in Darfur who don't normally write about humanitarian issues or Africa, but who do frequently write in support of militarism and in derogation of the UN. In this camp you have Kirchick, The Weekly Standard, Leon Wieseltier, Marty Peretz, etc. These people believe, naturally enough, that unilateral American military intervention in Darfur is the only responsible option. On the other hand, you have people whose interest in Darfur stems from a larger interest in humanitarian issues and in Africa. I'd take the International Crisis Group, the Enough Project, and Africa Action as typical of the latter. If you follow the links, you'll see that none of these organizations think that what Kirchick is saying about this is correct.

Meanwhile, as Kirchick himself notes, Obama is pretty close to Samantha Power who wrote the book on genocide. Like the people in the second camp, she's a skeptic about unilateral military intervention as the prime tool of fighting genocide. Indeed, she explains in the book that she thinks this kind of Kirchick-style thinking is counterproductive; sending people the message that if you care about this issue you need to sign on for a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention leads far more people to say "I should stop caring about this issue" than it leads to say "I should support a costly and geopolitically problematic military intervention." Thus, they favor thinking pragmatically about actions that might realistically be implemented.

The difference, though, is that if you're more interested in wielding Darfur as a bludgeon against liberals, the UN, Arabs, etc. than you are in saving people's lives, this kind of pragmatism becomes less appealing.

Comments

Great. It sounds almost too good to be true. I want to stop genocide, but I don't want the US to get bogged down in another hugely expensive operation. And besides, the political support just isn't there.

But, I'm curious: what possible course of action is there that would siimultaneously be less expensive, more politically viable, AND more effective?

Posted by Jim W | August 27, 2007 9:36 AM

Excellent post Matt.

Kirchick seems to have fallen completely off his rocker on this one.

Posted by ProfD | August 27, 2007 9:36 AM

The utter randomness of Sullivan's chosen replacement bloggers never ceases to amaze me. The only thing these people have in common is an ability, when put in one place, to reflect Sullivan's own deeply muddle-headed politics.

Also, what's Jamie Kirchik doing writing in the Providence Journal? I knew the Projo was in trouble, but man.

Posted by Christmas | August 27, 2007 9:40 AM

On the one hand, you have people who are interested in Darfur who don't normally write about humanitarian issues or Africa, but who do frequently write in support of militarism and in derogation of the UN. In this camp you have Kirchick, The Weekly Standard, Leon Wieseltier, Marty Peretz, etc.

I feel certain that those Euston fucks have a place at that table.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | August 27, 2007 9:41 AM

I haven't read the Power book but it seems worth noting that the argument that those who push for intervention are counterproductive doesn't acutally address the logic of their case as much as the pracitcal, political realities surrounding it.

Posted by berger | August 27, 2007 9:44 AM

What's the difference between 400,000 deaths in Darfur and 2 million deaths in the Congo?

Easy, there are no Arabs in the Congo.

Posted by mrs. ibrahim al-jafaari | August 27, 2007 10:05 AM

But, I'm curious: what possible course of action is there that would simultaneously be less expensive, more politically viable, AND more effective?

Click on link 'two' above (Hilzoy's post on Obama) for some of Obama's specific ideas, of which there are a fair number. NB: don't assume that I agree with them all, but he has some.

The most striking difference between Kirchick and Hilzoy is that Hilzoy actually cares about getting the specifics of Obama's position right, and she does a little digging through the records to back up what she says, whereas Kirchick to happy to distort Obama's position, even after being corrected. (E.g., he describes Obama as asserting "to avert one genocide the United States must avert all of them," which Hilzoy had already shown wasn't his point at all.)

Posted by Tim O'Keefe` | August 27, 2007 10:19 AM

No contest there: Hilzoy was accurate, well-informed, and subtle; Kirchick wasn't.

Posted by emmanuelgoldstein | August 27, 2007 10:25 AM

This particular bit of brain-dead even-the-liberal-new-republican faux-hawkish preening needs to be smacked down.

(SCENE: A conversation between Jamie Kirchick and a sane person.)

So you want a military intervention in Darfur? Wow, that's interesting. Are you planning to pull US troops out of Iraq to send them to Darfur? No? Are you planning to pull troops out of Afghanistan or Korea? No? Are you planning to openly advocate a draft, hired mercenaries, and/or higher taxes to increase the size of the military? No? Then shut the hell up, asshole!

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | August 27, 2007 10:32 AM

Indeed, she explains in the book that she thinks this kind of Kirchick-style thinking is counterproductive

I didn't get this from the Power book at all. I read her as saying diplomatic "naming and shaming", economic levers, logistics and communications disruptions, and various kinds of military interventions are *all* potentially useful ways of intervening to prevent/stop/slow genocides. Maybe they're to be prefered in that order, but she pretty clearly thinks the Kosovo example showed that militarty interventions could work.

I'm not saying I'm really confident in my reading of Power. But since she's the person I'm trying to pay most attention to to find a genuinely liberal and humanitarian view on global security, I'm curious about how to understand her on just these sorts of issues.

Posted by Scott E. | August 27, 2007 10:40 AM

No contest there: Hilzoy was accurate, well-informed, and subtle; Kirchick wasn't.

One is an intelligent philosophy professor who seems almost obsessed with the wonkish details of, well, everything. The other is a hack wanna-be pundit.

Considering who they are, it's not surprising at all to see the difference in characteristics of their editorials on the matter.

Unfortunately, it's also not a surprise to see which of the two was given space in a newspaper to air those opinions to the public.

Posted by mop | August 27, 2007 11:19 AM

How about the people who don't want to fight in Sudan's civil war? Who point out that what is happening in Darfur is not just a genocide but a war with sides and that by sending peacekeepers we would be underwriting an insurrection against the government of Sudan? I am no fan of the government of Sudan, but I nonetheless would prefer that the United States not go to war to dismember it, even at the cost of more refugees. The world is an unhappy place and we cannot fix everything.

Posted by Withheld | August 27, 2007 12:18 PM

What I like about this blog is Matt's ability to read people's minds and know their true intentions. That way you don't have to back up what you say with any reasoned argument. It's truely an amazing skill.

Posted by Dave | August 27, 2007 12:55 PM

What's the difference between 400,000 deaths in Darfur and 2 million deaths in the Congo?

Easy, there are no Arabs in the Congo. - mrs. ibrahim al-jafaari

Actually, according to Wikipedia it's 4 million. Plus 1 million internally displaced.

OTOH, one can then ask, which is worse, 4 million Congolese killed or 4 million Palestinian "refugees" (*) ... I should think getting killed is worse than being displaced. But I guess since there are few Jews in the Congo to blame, we can ignore those deaths for that reason as well?

* many of whom are refugees merely because they -- or rather their parents, how many other people are allowed to claim refugee status 'cause their parents are refugees? most other people are citizens of the land in which they are born ... so shouldn't, e.g., people born on the West Bank between 1948-1967 be Jordanian citizens and not refugees? and people born on the West Bank since, of course, should be considered Israeli citizens ... oh, but the occupation is "illegal", so I guess they are not legally Israeli citizens, are they? -- have not been assimilated into host countries ... e.g., does one today fret over the fate of Karelian refugees or blame the Czech Republic for the fate of the Sudeten refugees? of course not -- because in the late 1940s, as was accepted at the time, Finland, U.S. occupied Bavaria, etc, absorbed refugees displaced by the drawing of boundaries deemed necessary to avoid a repeat of WWI. Indeed, where such population transfers were accepted, peace has reigned, and where such population transfers were not accepted by one party (the Arab world) or not implimented (Yugoslavia), there has been war. Of course, if Iraq is to be partitioned, will it be accepted that Arabs living in 'Kurdistan' have no right of return, etc.? 'Cause if not, partitioning will accomplish nothing ...

Posted by DAS | August 27, 2007 12:56 PM

Obama is pretty close to Samantha Power who wrote the book on genocide. Like the people in the second camp, she's a skeptic about unilateral military intervention as the prime tool of fighting genocide...

Writing a book about genocide, which goes on the shelf along with the tens of thousands of books and movies on the Jewish genocide and the small shelf that has books the other larger Democides done by Communism and Islamics - accomplishes nothing.

Power is a great believer in the Supreme Moral Autority of the UN and other transnational institutions and "the majesty of international law". Shame they are failing miserably, not just in Rwanda, but in Darfur. Not to mention Liberia, Guinea-Bisseau, Ivory Coast, Congo where high breeding rates have created surplus people that must be gotten rid of one way or another, and Africans have a solution.

And if the Africans or Arab nations don't have the power to veto external meddling in their "sacred sovereign affairs", which they ordinarily do, the Chinese, Russians, even the French at times - are happy to step in and block external action, for a little quid pro quo.

Darfur is basically about black African villages that have quadrupled in size since the 50s now taking away the water and forage used by Arab nomads that maintain they have historical rights to the land as well.

Liberals do have a problem with their "Great causes" being selective in nature. Ignore the Congo because that is just black-on-black violence in the African 'hood - go hysterical when it is Arabs whacking blacks like they are evil white Lacrosse players with rags on their heads that the noble black must be saved from. Yet oppose arming the black Darfurans (small arms are bad and only government and their agents *Janjaweed???* should have them!) or counseling them to put their birthrate - (after Western medicine and sanitation with breeding traditions allowed a population explosion) - in consonance with scarce arable land, firewood, water.

I don't care much about Darfur, in the sense that it is just one more African-on-African conflict. Nor do I want the US to accept any significant numbers of African refugees as they are security risks and social burden and law enforcement problems where they settle.

I'd rather see us expend our efforts on lands where we can make a huge difference - Iraq, Myanmar, Indonesia, Vietnam....and perhaps one day peaceful reconciliation and working with Iran and Syria on a host of common interests.

But that's just me. And a general consensus of military people that want nothing to do with subsaharan Africa and it's eternal violenceand dysfunctionalism.

But that is not saying that Samantha Power cannot but down her book writing skills as volunteer to fight, or that Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch cannot become as educated in AK-47 use as he is in press releases. The last time the American Left actually volunteered to risk their asses was in the Lincoln Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. Even in WWII, most Lefties and Transnationals had to be unwillingly Drafted.

Since it has been 70 years since the Left and it's widely known constituent elements have done their fair share for fighting for the nation or to stop an evil force overseas, it's time for them to step up and for America to offer such critics who wouldn't be caught dead in a US Army uniform a new path. As UN volunteers, to be trained and assigned to UN "peacekeeping" forces. Or as "Progressive Mercenaries" funded by wealthy billionaires of the Left, to be airdropped into places like Congo and Darfur to fight and die for 3rd World causes...

Posted by Chris Ford | August 27, 2007 1:47 PM

Sorry Matthew, I've been writing my elected officials about African issues for decades and I find Obama (and Samantha Power, who should be ashamed of herself) 100% wrong. For that matter, so has Nick Kristof. Many, many non-neocons favor *some* unilateral projection of force in Darfur (like a no-fly zone). Most of these people would have participated in Congo peacekeeping and were in favor of US aiding Liberia in 2003.

And forget using force -- was that Obama chiming in with 6 of the other Dems refusing to even consider a boycott of the Chinese Olympics? Even just a cultural boycott? I believe it was. So let's not kid ourselves, it's not about lives or military entanglements, it's about money. Genocide is supposedly the issue where we put geopolitics aside. Darfur is the test of whether anyone who said "never again" really meant it.

Posted by Lymon | August 27, 2007 1:53 PM

Oh, OK. I just made exactly this argument in more labored and less elegant form over at Obsidian Wings. I would have quoted my favorite sh*t kicker with this statement:
"Don't ever mix sh*t and sugar because it don't do the sugar any good at all and it flat wrecks the sh*t." But every time I show my bawdy side over there I get criticized.

My point over there,and my point here, is that none of the suddenly enthusiastic "interventionists" on Darfur actually mean we should intervene to prevent genocide *now* in Darfur because of necessity that would mean recognizing and dealing with the fact that we are actually bogged down in Iraq preventing a *hypothetical, future* genocide and that American military power isn't a magic wand. The "new moralists" if I may call them that, have only discovered Darfur as a way of holding off the american people's demand to remove our soldiers from Iraq forthwith. The "intervene in darfur argument" is simply another version of the "humiliate and smear your opponents" technique which they have relentlessly employed thorughout the last few years. Say that we took seriously the argument that they try to make, which is that American politicians and America itself have an obligation to insist on military intervention whenever and whereever the charge of genocide can be laid--or, what? Kirchick's point is that Obama ought not to have the right to become president at all if he doesn't subscribe to this theory. But lets say he's right--Obama, every other political figure, and america itself ought to insist on committing militarily to fight off genocide wherever and whenever its occuring. Does kirchik think we should pull out of Iraq (after all, no genocide yet! the surge is working) to do so? Does he htink we should have a draft to raise the army necessary to staff gthree wars simultaneously?

If he doesn't know what policy he advocates when he excoraiates Obama for not subscribing to his theories of interventionism just what is he bitching about? Kirchick isn't making an argument about genocide, he's making an argument about the necessity of Iraq sucking up all our men, material and resources so that we *can't* intervene anywhere else on pricniple or in practice. And we shouldn't let him get away with it.

aimai

Posted by aimai | August 27, 2007 1:54 PM

Man, Kirchik is really shitting the bed, huh?

Posted by Some dude | August 27, 2007 2:59 PM

"Indeed, she explains in the book that she thinks this kind of Kirchick-style thinking is counterproductive . . ."
Samantha Power is for military intervention and her books and approach have been critiqued from that perspective by many. Howard Zinn recently had a letter in The Times Literary Supplement addressing the problems with Samantha Power's approach.

Posted by Joan | August 28, 2007 11:37 AM