The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
By Max Boot
Basic Books, 428 pages, $30
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
By Samantha Power
Basic Books, 610 pages, $30
It has been said America is a new Roman Empire. Some would argue this goes against the very grain of our founding principles: After all, we were once a colony of another great world empire.
Still, whether or not the U.S. is an empire–we possess no formal colonies, though many would argue our economic might constitutes virtually the same thing–two new books, Max Boot’s “The Savage Wars of Peace” and Samantha Power’s “A Problem From Hell,” ask us to consider what the obligations of a democratic world power, empire or no, should be.
Boot delivers a clear message in his rollicking (if repetitive) chronicle of 200 years of American warmaking: America should behave like an empire. The problem is we don’t. Boot urges American policymakers to “be less apologetic, less hesitant, less humble” about using our power. We have the muscle, he says–we only need to flex it. But Boot wants the U.S. to couple brute force with enlightened principles; he proposes that America act as global enforcer for a kind of empire of liberty, which will bring sweetness and light to all. At heart, Boot is that rare creature: a do-gooding conservative. Throwing down the gauntlet to isolationists (and the dominant voices of the Bush administration, who want nothing to do with rebuilding Afghanistan), Boot provocatively says we must carry out the vital work of “state building” in countries that, ravaged by disorder, are unable to govern themselves. “Without a benevolent hegemon to guarantee order, the international scene can degenerate quickly into chaos and worse,” he writes.
But to do this, first we must get our military house in order. Our strategic sensibility is outmoded, Boot argues, as is the way most Americans think of our military history. The tradition of American warfare is not one of big battles, the ones we all learn about in school–the D-Days or Battles of the Bulge–but is rather an endless series of small wars that have bolstered American interests during its history.
Boot sharply critiques the American armed forces and their outlook. “Their mindset,” he writes “remains that of a mass army composed of conscripts mobilized to win a big war, but that is not the role of the armed forces early in the twenty-first century. They are a smaller, all-volunteer force, one of whose duties is policing the Pax Americana.” Simply put, the American military needs an attitude adjustment. An imperial nation requires a nimble force, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, one that must go beyond the narrowly prescribed objectives of a mass army, namely large-scale missions and decisive battles. An imperial army, Boot argues, is one willing to accept deployments with sometimes-ambiguous ends. In Boot’s vision, soldiers of an imperial army aren’t simply soldiers; they might double as police patrolling a beat, which is what the Marines did in Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916, when both countries were racked by instability. In essence, “The Savage Wars of Peace” is a long refresher course, studded with scores of examples, on a different military tradition–one that is distinctly imperial and that American military leaders have seemingly disavowed. As Boot puts it, there is “another American way of war.” Boot is confident our present can be guided by our past; we need only reacquaint ourselves with it.
From 1800 to 1934, Boot writes, Marines put ashore in 180 overseas landings. They did so for many reasons, ranging from the protection of American property, to the defense of imperiled missionaries, to the restoration of order (e.g. Haiti), to bringing to book rebel leaders deemed unfriendly to America, as in Nicaragua, where U.S. soldiers jousted with the forces of Augusto Sandino (who would inspire a generation of Latin American leftists) in the late 1920s and early ’30s. Some operations took days; others took years of strife. What distinguishes these campaigns, Boot notes, is that most “were fought by a relatively small number of professional soldiers pursuing limited objectives with limited means.”
Boot’s research often turns up some intriguing incidents. For example, the U.S. had its own little spat with Argentina over the Falkland Islands in the 1830s. In the early years of the republic, we were a feisty lot, especially our swashbuckling naval officers. “No matter how small the navy,” Boot notes “its hot-blooded captains always stood ready to avenge the slightest insult, real or perceived against American people and property.” Boot’s early chapters unspool like an overlong Errol Flynn movie. There is much booming of cannon, crossing of swords and general deck-top heroics. Boot briskly catalogs the many military excursions of the 19th Century, starting with our wars against the Barbary pirates of north Africa (who were playing havoc with American shipping), which lasted from 1801 until 1805. “[I]t was because of these wars,” he writes, “that the United States gained a navy and a marine corps and a role on the world stage.”
As the century progressed, the Marines and their naval comrades were everywhere, it seems: in Korea in 1871, trying to force that country open to Western commerce; in Panama in 1885, when rebel forces harassed the American-owned Panama Railroad, a vital transportation link between the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean; in China helping to put down the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. By the end of the century, the U.S. had established itself as a power in the Caribbean basin and Central America. We were aggressive stewards of our own back yard: The Army, for example, effectively ruled Cuba from 1899 until 1902, and Marines contended with sundry rebel forces in Nicaragua during the first third of the 20th Century. As informative as this history is, Boot can be a little too exhaustive: For example, our landings in Uruguay are surely of minor historical importance.
Still, Boot’s narrative bustles with engaging personalities and forgotten heroes, like Marine Maj. Smedley Butler, who led missions in Nicaragua and Haiti during the early decades of the 20th Century. Boot clearly admires Butler’s fearless, can-do professionalism, praising him as “America’s foremost colonial soldier in the early years of the twentieth century.” Then there was irascible, gung-ho Army Brig. Gen. Frederick Funston, who positively thrilled to battle. He made his name in the Philippines campaign of 1899-1902, where he stood out “as one of the most reckless and courageous officers in the army,” Boot says.
Boot’s reassessment of this campaign is crucial to his ambitious thesis. After the U.S. routed Spain in the Spanish-American War, in 1898, we took possession of the islands. But a determined and rather ferocious band of insurrectos refused to submit to another colonial power and waged a well-fought guerrilla war against American forces. Nearly 127,000 Army infantrymen (though never more than 69,000 at a time) fought 2,800 engagements and pacified the country. Though this campaign has often been written off as naked imperialism (noted writers and intellectuals of the day, such as Mark Twain, spoke out against it), Boot subtly argues that the U.S. policy was quite progressive. To be sure, the fighting could be savage–Filipino prisoners were tortured (or often shot outright), towns were burned–but on balance, the campaign was far less brutal than the Belgians were in the Congo, Boot argues. Indeed, our influence was largely a constructive one, he notes, for the inheritance of war was the apparatus of the modern state: We “bequeathed to the Filipinos . . . public schools, a free press, an independent judiciary, a modern bureaucracy, democratic government, and separation of church and state.” And, in contrast to the Dutch in the East Indies, or the British in Malaya, “Americans left virtually no legacy of economic exploitation.” This is an important chapter, for Boot tries to reinterpret imperialism as a benevolent, liberating ideology. Boot’s point is clear: We were state-builders then, and so we must be now.
For Boot, the Philippines campaign is in many ways a model and harbinger of 20th Century American interventions in Haiti (1915-1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916-1924). These interventions, he argues, left both countries better off, ridding them–if only temporarily–of political corruption, banditry and general lawlessness. To those who argue that American economic rapaciousness always drove its foreign policy in Latin America and the Caribbean, Boot counters that we had little investment in Haiti and the Dominican Republic; for them, we were merely exporters of good government.
Boot’s view of American power is decidedly benign; he sees it as mostly a force for good. This is a sentiment many (especially on the left) will roundly reject. Even on the divisive issue of Vietnam (to which he devotes a long chapter), he doesn’t question our motives so much as our tactics, arguing keenly that American military leaders comprehensively ignored our small-war past and instead treated Vietnam as a conventional big war.
In his conclusion, Boot pointedly asks:
“Should the United States involve itself in others’ civil wars? Should America try to save foreigners from the cruelties of their neighbors or rulers? I believe the answer is yes, at least under certain circumstances.”
Boot is vague about what those “certain circumstances” might entail. He has almost nothing to say about the most evil of those cruelties–genocide–and what the duty of the U.S. might be.
Take Rwanda, for example. Many, including Samantha Power, have argued that it would have taken maybe a few thousand troops to put down the Hutus, who, armed mostly with machetes and garden tools, slaughtered some 800,000 ethnic Tutsis in a few months in 1994. Would a committed group of professional soldiers, infused with Smedley Butler’s battling, can-do ethos, have been able to stop the killings? Whether or not one accepts the arguments Power makes in her superb book “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” this country, despite its might, has been unable–indeed, perversely reluctant–to stop systematic killings in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Iraq, mass slaughters that are one of the grim hallmarks of the modern era. Politicians may invoke the hackneyed phrase “Never again,” but the sad reality of the last century was “again and again.”
“We have all been bystanders to genocide,” Power writes. “The crucial question is why.”
Power answers this question with impressive thoroughness. Her book is a gripping work of historical analysis written with much care. Power has interviewed many policymakers–foreign-service officers, State Department officials, UN personnel–and has scoured the secondary sources (her footnotes alone are miracles of research and interpretative depth). Power’s chapters on the genocides of the late 20th Century–in Cambodia under the terror of the Khmer Rouge, who killed 2 million people in 1974 and ’75; in Rwanda in the mid-’90s; in Iraq, which systematically eliminated hundreds of Kurdish families in the late ’80s; and the so-called ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian wars of the early ’90s–are excellent short studies. Power recounts a grim record, one that will move and outrage any reader. She makes clear that steps could have been taken along the way, by the UN and, most importantly, the U.S., to prevent–or at least forestall–the brutalities that were visited upon millions of innocent victims.
Power begins her story with the first genocide of the 20th Century, in which the Ottoman army murdered about 1 million Armenians during World War I, which an inflamed American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, unsuccessfully implored his country to stop. In the 1920s, these killings became the obsession of Polish lawyer and activist Raphael Lemkin, who would devote the rest of his life to the prevention of mass murder. His was often a lonely crusade: In the 1930s, European leaders ignored his call for an international law prohibiting “the destruction of nations, races, and religious groups.” Still, he persisted with his efforts. In a 1944 book he coined the word “genocide” to capture the unique essence of a crime in which “one set of individuals intended to destroy the members of a group not because of anything they did but because of who they were,” as Power notes with beautiful cogency.
Lemkin, though, achieved a terrible vindication from the Nazi destruction of the Jews. (Though Lemkin, who was Jewish, escaped Europe in 1941, most of his family was wiped out.) The world was forced to act. In the years just after the war, Lemkin’s manic drive–he relentlessly stalked the halls of the United Nations in New York City, buttonholing any official who would listen to him–led to the passing of the UN convention on genocide in 1948. But years of striving left him a broken man. Soon after the convention’s passage, he was hospitalized; he poignantly called his condition ” `Genociditis, . . . exhaustion from work on the Genocide Convention.’ “
Despite the convention’s passage by the General Assembly, 20 UN member states still had to ratify it domestically before it became official international law. By 1950, 20 countries (including Cambodia) had done so, but the convention’s supporters desperately needed the imprimatur of the world’s leading democracy. But the U.S. remained intransigent. Until it was assured its sovereignty wouldn’t be compromised (in particular, Southern senators fretted that segregation might be construed as constituting “mental harm,” which the convention defined as an element of genocide), the U.S. refused to endorse the convention. It would be 40 years before the U.S. ratified the convention, and its passage was due largely to the efforts of Sen. William Proxmire (D-Wis.), who carried on Lemkin’s struggle. Proxmire displayed all of Lemkin’s tenacity, wearing down his colleagues with a speech a day for some 20 years, from 1967 until 1988, when the Senate approved the convention.
U.S. ambivalence over the crime of genocide is but one troubling aspect of the question at the heart of this book: Why? Power provides many convincing answers. In one regard, she argues, it is a simple failure of the human imagination. Power recounts a stunning encounter between an exiled Polish diplomat and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1941. When told what the Nazis were doing to the Jews, Frankfurter responded:
” `I don’t believe you. . . . I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.’ “
We constantly hear echoes of Frankfurter’s disbelief. Power quotes foreign-service officer Charles Twining’s response to Cambodians (whom he interviewed in refugee camps in the mid-’70s) fleeing the insane bloodletting of the Khmer Rouge:
” `I kept saying to myself, “This can’t be possible in this day and age. This is not 1942. This is 1975.” I really thought that those days, those acts, were behind us.’ “
Ironically, the Holocaust itself has proven a hindrance, constricting our vision of exactly what genocide is. When mass killings happen, they are invariably dismissed as “not the Holocaust.” Power quotes Scott Simon of National Public Radio as remarking, ” `No war crime short of Hitler seems to impress us.’ ” The distorting lens of the Holocaust, combined with a failed capacity for imagining evil, has proven a potent–and disabling–force. Thus, one genocide helps beget another; those who commit crimes against humanity are emboldened, confident no one will do anything to stop them. During the Balkan wars, Serb warlords were quoted again and again mocking Western inaction as they slaughtered Bosnian Muslims. And Power quotes the mocking, chilling words of an Iraqi commander planning a gas attack against the Kurds:
” `I will kill them all with chemical weapons! . . . Who is going to say anything? The international community?’ “
Despite the efforts of Senate staffer Peter Galbraith (one of the few heroes of Power’s book), who risked his life in a 1988 trip to Iraqi Kurdistan to collect evidence, Iraqis annihilated entire Kurdish villages with impunity. The “international community” hardly uttered a peep, and the U.S.–at the time obsessed with Iran and an ally and business partner of Iraq–looked away. Again and again, the naked realities of realpolitik swayed decision-makers.
Power, to her credit, does not shy away from the problems of the genocide convention. She notes that the word “genocide” itself, as defined in the convention, “suffered then (as it suffers now) from several inherent definitional problems.” She points out that a genocide does not require the total destruction of a group for it to be a crime; “ongoing or outstanding intent” is a crucial factor.
Power also exactingly documents how U.S. officials have evaded the nuances of the genocide convention. During the Balkan wars, the semantic game-playing reached absurd heights. While the Serbs wiped out one Muslim village after another, the Clinton administration (whose officials, with the exception of a few defiant State Department hands, come off as dithering hand-wringers) exploited the ambiguities of the convention to the hilt, refusing to use the “g-word.” For if we had accused the Serbs of perpetrating genocide, the U.S., as a signatory to the convention, would have been compelled to do something. To the end, the U.S. rationalized Serbian aggression. Then again, as the pages of Power’s stunning book attest, the human capacity for rationalization is limitless.
Near the end of her text, Power quotes George Bernard Shaw:
” `The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ “
Riffing stirringly on those words, Power concludes, “After a century of doing so little to prevent, suppress, and punish genocide, Americans must join . . . the ranks of the unreasonable.”
Still, the question remains whether we will have the fortitude to finally join those ranks when that next terrible–and, sadly, inevitable–occasion demands that we not merely stand by and do nothing.
