Power's award-winning, critically acclaimed doorstop of a book is a must-read for anyone concerned about the rise of international authoritarianism, ethnic retribution, and genocidal atrocities and about the world's apparent inability to stop such occurrences. It's not a comprehensive history of twentieth-century genocide; instead, Power includes a series of case studies, focusing on Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia, along with brief capsule summaries of the 1917 Armenian genocide and the Holocaust.
She opens the book with a history of the word "genocide" and its recognition as an international crime. The hero of this part of her story is Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word, formulated its legal definition, and badgered the United Nations to adopt the 1948 Genocide Convention (which, sadly, the United States refused to ratify until 1986--and then only to save face after Reagan's embarrassment at Bitburg).
She then moves to her gut-wrenching examples, showing how (except in the case of Kosovo) each followed a nearly predictable trajectory, with a complacent and cowardly world community standing by in denial. Still, she spotlights heroic actions by a few, including William Proxmire, whose 3,211 Senate speeches over 19 years failed to shame his colleagues into passing the Genocide Convention; Peter Galbraith, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff member who struggled to publicize Hussein's gassing of the Kurds; and Robert Dole and Madeleine Albright, whose combined fury forced the Clinton administration to confront the nightmares in Bosnia and Kosovo. Her accounts of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia are especially lucid for those of us whose heads spin with confusion whenever we hear mention of the Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian-Herzegovinian-Slovenian-Macedonian conflicts.
Because Power's stories are so distressing and her goal is so laudable, the sympathetic reader is all the more frustrated by the book's faults, of which there are several. While emotionalism and outrage can be commendable (and understandable, given the inconceivable number of innocent victims whenever the world fails to respond to genocidal atrocities), her pronunciations sometimes betray her zeal. The resulting indignation can often result in Monday-morning quarterbacking and moral condescension, either of which might simply alienate those readers who aren't convinced that the United States has the wherewithal to be the world's policeman. Granted, Power is right to condemn U.S. officials for doing nearly nothing, especially in the case of Rwanda, but she often assumes that what, in retrospect, we should have done is what, at the time, we could have done. (Surely we must do something, but it doesn't follow that anything will do.)
Likewise, she claims that the United States has "done nothing, practically or politically, to prepare itself to respond to genocide," and she bases this statement--and several like it--mostly on the assumption that, before Kosovo, this country has never prevented genocide. Such statements are easy to assert (since genocide has certainly occurred) but impossible to rebut (since it's difficult to claim genocide was prevented in those situations when it didn't happen at all).
Second, she maintains that, given the world's dysfunctional international and regional organizations, the United States must assume the role of white knight. She bridles at suggestions by opponents of unilateral intervention that our status as a superpower will always make our motives suspect or that American ground troops are not as capable of both imposing regional order and handling multiple crises as she seems to believe. (Perhaps our adventures in Iraq have made her reconsider this pollyannaish militarism.) She is unimpeachably correct that our country must act when signs portending genocide are detected, but certainly we must hesitate before we ever do it alone.
A model of successful non-military intervention, for example, is East Timor. Although Power gives a two-sentence mention to the 1975 genocide, she doesn't point out that the United States took the lead in preventing a repeat occurrence in 1999--without committing a single American troop. After an initial hesitation, the U.S. coordinated a multilateral response against Indonesia with members of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, support from China, and troops from Australia. (See Michael Hirsch's "At War With Ourselves" for an excellent summary of this unheralded diplomatic coup.) Such a regionally concocted solution might work as well in other--but certainly not all--situations.
Finally, and most seriously, Power is quick to condemn governments and government officials, but (except for an anecdote in the Introduction), she neglects entirely to chastise her colleagues and employers in the media. She repeatedly asserts that political leaders can convince the public to disregard any initial qualms about humanitarian intervention, but she never acknowledges that it is difficult to do so in an environment where journalists and editors entirely ignore (for example) the current horror in Sudan and prefer instead to plaster the Scott Peterson trial across the front page and cover sports-team brawls during every news-hour.
If these criticisms sound disproportionately harsh, it is simply because I am holding Power (and her colleagues in the media) to the same high standards she posits for our elected leaders. My caveats should in no way minimize the importance of her work; instead, "A Problem from Hell" is so successful in large part because it motivates readers to face such unforgivable horrors and to consider how best to prevent them.
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I'm sure the content of the book is great. But this dirt (it was some sticky residue) was not at all in the description...sorely disappointed with how disgusting it is.
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