The Big Lie Americans Tell

Themselves

BY DHRUVA JAISHANKAR-AUGUST 9, 2014

At an August 7 press conference, Ed Henry of Fox

News askedWhite House Press Secretary Josh Earnest a straightforward
question about President Barack Obama's decision to authorize force
against the Islamic State (IS): "Is preventing a genocide in America's core
interests?" The question assumed greater resonance later that day, when
Obama justified military action in Iraq "to prevent a potential act of
genocide," as IS surrounds thousands of members of Iraq's Yazidi religious
sect.
Earnest paused. Then, in his incoherent non-answer, he paid lip-service to

one of the most persistent truisms in American foreign policy: "Of course
the United States has been and will continue to be a beacon for freedom
and respect for basic human rights around the globe. And that is a core
founding principle of this country and one that American men and women
have fought and died to protect. And we will continue to stand up for that
value."

The current generation seems to believe that preventing genocide around

the world is and has always been in the United States' interest. From calls
to intervene in Syria, to activism around Save Darfur,' toattention paid to
anti-Rohingya Muslim violence in Myanmar, there is widespread believe that
the United States will intervene in troubledspots around the world.
But Washington has alwayshad a dismal record of stopping genocides and
ethnic cleansing, and that is unlikely to change.
With few exceptions, the U.S. response to grave humanitarian crisis since it
emerged as a major power in the 1870s have ranged from tacit support and
indifference to post-facto condemnation. Probably the first example was in
the 1880s, when then President Chester A. Arthur recognized and supported
Belgian King Leopold's claims to the Congo. Leopold's brutal rule -indiscriminate violence against local populations, collective punishment,
and mutilations,led to the death of several million Congolese, if not more.
Despite decades of lobbying for the United States to take a strong position
against Leopold, Washington remained reluctant. Teddy Roosevelt,
president from 1901 to 1909, said "it was a literal physical impossibility to
interfere" and called the idea of campaigning for intervention "imbecile."
In subsequent decades, U.S. presidents more isolationist than Roosevelt
refused to stop Japanese atrocities in East Asia, Turkey's genocide in
Armenia, or European colonizers' large-scale killing of civilians in places like

Southeast Asia. Joseph Stalin's forced deportation of some 6 million

minorities in the Soviet Union in the 1930s -- ethnic cleansing in its truest
sense -- did not diminish the admiration for him by some in the highest
levels of U.S. government, including Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vice
president Henry A. Wallace (who later tried to make amends by publishing
an article called "Where I Was Wrong").
What about the Holocaust? U.S. war efforts certainly contributed to the
defeat of Nazi Germany and put an end to the most horrifyingly
industrialized genocide in history. But American popular lore often overlooks
the fact that on December 11, 1941, Adolf Hitler first declared war on the
United States -- and not vice versa. The United States' humanitarian
intentions -- despite having learned about Auschwitz and other
concentration camps -- were an afterthought.
It gets worse. The United States managed to win the Cold War against the
Soviet Union while preserving its moral high ground. But that period may
have marked a nadir for the United States when it came to genocide and
ethnic cleansing. As Princeton professor Gary J. Bassdocuments in his 2013
book The Blood Telegram, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger tacitly
supported the Pakistan military's ethnic cleansing in East Pakistan in the
early 1970s, which led to the deaths ofat least 300,000 people. It wasn't
until an opportunistic intervention by India in 1971 -- which the United
Nations overwhelming condemned -- that the mass killings stopped.
And when the Khmer Rouge conducted its reign of terror in Cambodia from
1975 to 1979, leading to the death of up to 25 percent of its roughly 7
million people -- proportionally the largest genocide of the 20th century -Washington remained aloof. Because of its then geopolitical interests at the
time with regards to opening up to China and spurning the USSR and
Vietnam, Washington opted for a policy of non-intervention, a morally

indefensible stance. The United States was even critical of the 1978-1979
invasion of Cambodia by a pro-Soviet Vietnamthat ended Pol Pot's reign.
Similarly, when Saddam Hussein used chemical and conventional weapons
to kill an estimated 100,000 ethnic Kurds in Iraq in 1988, Washington -having recently made overtures to Baghdad, with which it then had a
common adversary in Iran -- did not even impose sanctions, much less
intervene.
It was the hands-off approach to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, at a
moment of unchallenged U.S. global supremacy, that awoke the United
States from its slumber. Many, including current U.S. National Security
Advisor Susan Rice, then a young National Security Council official dealing
with international organizations and peacekeeping, felt that Washington
could and should have stopped the genocide, which saw members of the
Hutu ethnicity slaughter more than half a millionethnic Tutsis in just a few
months.

Given its century-long track record of non-intervention, the 1999 U.S.-led

bombing campaign in Yugoslavia to stop the Serbian ethnic cleansing of
Kosovar Albanians was an aberration. But even in that case, Washington
was arguably influenced as much by other considerations -- Western
European countries' determination to intervene, Washington's enmity with
Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic, and the United States'
overwhelming military superiority -- as altruism. And America's subsequent
record -- failing to stop the ethnic cleansing in the Sudanese region of
Darfur, in the shambolic Central African Republic, or (again) in the Congo,
has been dismal.
Why then do so many Americans cling to the belief that genocide

prevention has been -- or could be -- a core national interest? Some of the

self-delusion may stem from America's self-image as a moral superpower,
combined with the unambiguous success of the 1999 NATO bombing
campaign in the Balkans. And it is hard to underestimate the influence of
the 2002 book A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power -- now U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations -- on the foreign policy community. Yet
Power's book, which drew attention to the Washington's poor track record
on genocide prevention, has produced far more in the way of historical
revisionism than changes to policy.
None of this grim history should mean that the United States lacks a moral
compass in its international relations. Nor does it mean that Washington
should not help the Yazidis and other minority groups at the receiving end
of the Islamic State's savagery. That is a call for senior U.S. leaders to
make, taking into account their country's interests, abilities, costs, and
risks. But let's get one thing straight: Stopping genocide is not a core U.S.
national security interest, nor has it ever been, and realizing that would be
better than radiating false hope to persecuted minorities the world over.

Omar Havana/Getty Images

Posted by Thavam