In addition to the failure of the Iraq war’s opponents to genuinely confront Saddam’s mass murdering, the Bush administration’s bad faith must be similarly cited. The war’s opponents correctly pointed to the selectivity of U.S. interventionism. The argument that because you do not depose all mass murderers, dictators, and brutes, you should not depose any—similar to an argument no one dares to venture that because you do not punish all your society’s murderers, you should punish none—is a logical, moral, and policy embarrassment. Nevertheless, it does highlight that the Bush administration, like other American administrations, was unconscionably selective in compassion for victims, blithely inattentive to eliminationist politics’ victims elsewhere, and cynically uninterested in stopping the perpetrators.
The United States’ woeful response to the catastrophic mass murdering, population expulsions, and related deaths from starvation and disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Southern Sudan, Darfur, and elsewhere demonstrates its political leadership’s continuing disregard for seriously combating mass murder and eliminationist politics. Contemporaneous with the run-up to the Iraq war, the war itself, and the war’s tottering and uncertain nation-building aftermath, these other mass murders and eliminations exceeded Saddam’s in Iraq and would have cost far less to end militarily. Indeed, speaking candidly in the pre- 9/11 world, Bush himself declared his real view. On American national television, invoking the morally bankrupt but rhetorically powerful justification of “national interest” (here called “strategic interest”), he proclaimed that the United States “should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interest.”13 September 11 did not lead Bush to alter his position that when a government is slaughtering and expelling hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in a country or context deemed not to affect the U.S. national interest, American soldiers must not be risked. Bush’s holy grail of “strategic interest,” narrowly construed, echoed Clinton, invoking “the cumulative weight of American interests” in 1994 at the height of the Hutu’s slaughter of Tutsi to justify his inaction: Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher, citing the absence of any “national interest,” a year earlier during the Serbs’ eliminationist assault on Bosnians to rationalize the United States’ allowing that mass murdering and expulsion to proceed. Bush merely echoed what has guided every American president during our time, and the views most of the policy elite and probably a large majority of the American people appear to share. Bush and his administration, like those before them, stood by and watched the “ethnic cleansing[s] and genocide[s]” before their eyes. The Europeans are better, only occasionally, in paying lip service to how horrible it all is.
The United States has conservative interventionists and conservative isolationists, and liberal interventionists and liberal isolationists. Yet each group’s support or opposition to U.S. intervention depends more on the particular case’s implications for American power and their respective conceptions of the “national interest” (American power being one integral component). Again and again, political leaders and elites prove themselves egoistic, with little if any inclination to act morally in the international arena, particularly when it might incur substantial costs for them or their societies. Even political leaders and elites, especially powerful international actors, not trumpeting the “national interest” (narrowly construed), tack to it closely. In other countries, similar considerations about American power and their own national interests guide political and media elites’ assessments of the desirability of American intervention abroad, which, whether they like it or not, is necessary for effective international intervention in most every part of the world.
The recent, slight progress in the international community’s stance regarding eliminationist assaults remains a distraction from the most fundamental and enduring fact: The international community, as exemplified in law, institutions, and politics, is organized in a manner that makes stopping mass-murdering and eliminationist political leaders enormously difficult. Thus, it almost never happens. States sometimes do act, or consider acting, to stop mass murder and other eliminationist policies, when proximity makes such horrors more real, tangible, emotionally unavoidable, or costly. The three principal kinds of proximity affecting political leaders are geographic (actual or virtual, such as on television), circumstances and events impinging on material or political interests, and fellow feeling, commonly called identity. We need to increase leaders’ and ordinary citizens’ proximity to other peoples along these dimensions. But this is not easy even if some progress is possible and, in any quantity, potentially lifesaving.
The international system’s current, disheartening state notwithstanding, a more precise view of its features, and its somewhat improvement, can help us think through the measures that would reduce the mass-murderous and eliminationist toll in the coming century.
Ordinarily, we focus on the factors causing or generating mass murder and elimination. This helps us understand why the horrors occur. It may also point to ways they can be prevented or halted. Yet a different, neglected perspective is also important to develop: a braking model of mass eliminations. By examining the elements that, if properly effected, can stop them from happening, we can think more precisely about what has gone wrong and how to recraft institutions or policies to set them right.
Brakes can be set at various levels and in many ways. Reducing exterminationist and eliminationist politics can occur at the international or domestic system level, or both. Even if these general systems are not properly constituted to impede eliminationist politics, mass murder and elimination’s incidence can still be reduced by specifically targeting the two groups indispensable for eliminationist and exterminationist politics: the leaders initiating the onslaught, and the followers implementing it.
These four, the international political environment, the domestic political order, leaders, and followers, interact with each other. Interventionist policies can also be intertwined and coordinated. Still, some of these are more potentially effective than others for reducing the frequency and scope of mass murder and elimination. The international arena is the most important. Only by changing its functioning can we at once and systematically affect all potential eliminationist states, leaders, and societies.
International environments crucially affect domestic politics and society. In a bellicose world, with countries prone to making war or armed so they could, a country devotes many more resources to armaments and defense than in a more peaceful international environment. Heightened militarism affects and distorts a country’s economy, politics, and culture. In turn, it makes actual or potential antagonists more insecure, subjectively needing to further enhance their own military capacities, taking a toll on their own countries’ domestic lives. This reaction, then, rebounds back on the first country, which had armed to increase its security, making it again be and feel less secure. (This international environmental paradox of attempts to increase security producing greater insecurity is known as the “security trap.”) In a different international environment, an economic one of increased international trade, especially when international trade organizations devoted to maintaining fair trade rules, import and export opportunities affect companies’ and workers’ strategies in country after country, and the politics that each, as well as national polities, pursue. In yet another international environment that allows most aspects of domestic political life to be governed at least in part at the international level, with organizations that can promulgate and enforce binding rules, a country’s domestic politics, economics, society, and culture change procedurally and substantively. This has been most evident with the European Union, which has profoundly affected its members’ domestic politics and societies, and their governments’ operations, in no small part because a substantial part of members’ national legislation implements European Union laws.
The international environment’s powerful and general effect on states’ and societie
s’ practices extends also to eliminationist politics. Substantially changing the international environment vis-à-vis exterminationist and eliminationist politics would greatly affect their incidence and practice. A changed international environment in a given realm or policy area alters the structure of incentives for leaders, regimes, and followers everywhere in the world. It addresses, as one must when thinking seriously about broad policy responses to worldwide problems, the rational aspects—purposive, cost-benefit calculations—that contribute to exterminationist and eliminationist assaults. It does so in two ways. It creates tangible responses to eliminationist politics’ practice. It also induces political leaders to anticipate those international responses and alter their cost-benefit conclusions, motivating them not to initiate or continue with annihilative and other eliminationist programs.
We can wait for the international system to evolve sufficiently, and perhaps it might. But in the meantime, millions will die. We could have similarly urged patience in 1990—and we’d be where we currently are—or we could have in the meantime saved millions of lives from ruination and extinction.
In Chapter 6 I discussed aspects of the international environment, in two respects, showing first the genocide convention’s specific multiple and abject failures, and second the international environment’s enormous permissiveness toward eliminationist assaults. I identified four dimensions that constitute the international political environment regarding mass murder and eliminations: A legal dimension: Are mass murder or eliminations legally proscribed? A rhetorical dimension: Are they publicly discussed and condemned? An action dimension: Are states and international organizations permissive toward eliminationist assaults in practice and policy, or do they act to stop them? A hortatory dimension: Do outside actors encourage or support other states and political leaders to undertake exterminationist or eliminationist assaults? The analysis revealed our time’s three successive periods: The first, prior to Nuremberg and the genocide convention’s establishment in 1948; the second, from 1948 through the early 1990s (with substantial changes starting with the advent of human rights doctrine in the late 1970s); and the third from the early 1990s until today. During each period considerable variation has existed along each dimension and their coalescence into a coherent environment, though in sum there has been little progress according to the reasonable standard that the international community (1) proscribes all eliminationist assaults (including small-scale and less lethal ones), (2) immediately and forcefully condemns those that occur, (3) allows for any state or states to intervene to stop such assaults, and (4) such intervention actually takes place quickly and effectively. Picking up on that earlier foundational discussion, here I explore in greater depth the action dimension. What have the international legal environment and states’ actions been to prevent or stop eliminationist assaults?
The anti-eliminationist action any international political environment offers to combat domestic eliminationist politics has three principal components: prevention, intervention, and justice. The individual international regimes that develop around each of these anti-eliminationist actions can be institutionalized in international law, international institutions’ and federations’ policies, and individual countries’ law and policies. If and how this happens crucially affects eliminationist assaults’ incidence, scope, and success.
Prevention in its broadest sense means creating general conditions likely to inhibit eliminationist and exterminationist politics. An international political prevention regime—laws, institutions, and practices—would work actively to create conditions that stop leaders from choosing to pursue eliminationist politics. It will even remove the practical basis (opportunities for success and getting followers to follow) for leaders to seriously consider such programs and for followers to be willing to implement them. The second component, intervention, has international actors—states acting singly or together, or international institutions spearheading member states—taking measures to stop specific mass murders or eliminations. These measures include diplomatic and economic efforts and sanctions, and military intervention, with clear and appropriate circumstances or events triggering them, individually or in conjunction with one another. The third component, justice, includes a wide range of necessary features, including punishing perpetrators and offering measures of repair—political, material, and moral. Repair is critical for justice, yet less so for reducing eliminationist politics. Hence the ensuing discussion focuses on justice’s punitive component, which itself has two critical dimensions: how broadly mass murder and elimination’s initiators and implementers are punished, and punishment’s certitude.
Bearing these three components in mind, what has the international political environment been for combating eliminationist politics? First, unless we confine ourselves to large-scale mass murder, there would be little to analyze. The international community has responded to non-mass-murderous eliminationist domestic politics with near total permissiveness, offering no serious legal or institutionalized policy response, except humanitarian aid to people insistently referred to euphemistically as displaced persons (as if it just somehow happened) instead of the expellees that they are. To lethal eliminationist onslaughts the international community has taken occasional ad hoc responses, such as NATO’s intervention to stop the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults against Bosniaks and again against Kosovars, but each came only after the Serbs—whose murderous intentions and deeds were long known—had killed, burned homes and villages, and expelled their victims in massive numbers. Louis Gentile, the UN high commission for refugees’ head of operations in Banja Luka, Bosnia, in January 1994 wrote in the Globe & Mail: “It should be known and recorded for all time, that the so-called leaders of the Western world have known for the past year and a half what is happening here. They receive play-by-play reports. They talk of prosecuting war criminals but do nothing to stop the continuing war crimes. May God forgive them, may God forgive us all.”14 In East Timor, success came after an even longer period of shameful failure. When the United Nations inserted peacekeepers in 1999 to forestall still more killing and expulsions, it did so only after more than twenty neglectful years, as the world with a willful blind eye watched the Indonesians perpetrate mass murder, mass expulsions, and mass incarcerations on that island. These interventions, checkered as they are as successes, are all the international community has effectively done.
Paralleling the past hundred years’ overall international environment for eliminationist politics, the specific international regime of laws, institutions, and practices for action against mass murder can be divided into three periods. Prior to Nuremberg, the international community’s treatment of mass murder mirrored other forms of eliminationist politics. It was practically a nonissue. Given international institutions’ paucity, save for a few treaties such as the Geneva Convention, this comes as little surprise. The League of Nations, established in 1919 and a forerunner of the United Nations, was weak and poorly functioning. Institutionalized international or multinational state cooperation was restricted mainly to selected economic matters and issues of war. There were no prevention, intervention, or punishment regimes. The institutions did not exist. Even more, among states shaping international relations, the belief was weak to nonexistent that international antigenocide regimes were needed. This too should not surprise, as few countries were democracies. The powerful countries, democratic or not, were themselves imperial powers, either practicing or potentially practicing eliminationist politics, including mass murder, in their colonies.
The shock of the Holocaust and more broadly the Germans’ predations across Europe (and to a lesser degree of the Japanese in Asia) ushered in the second period that can be called the United Nations- Nuremberg regime. The victorious Allies established at Nuremberg an ad hoc International Military Tribunal doing three things. It created the first body of international law codifying aspects of mass murder, under the rubrics of “crimes against humanity” and “war crimes.” It proscribed t
hese crimes. And it provided punishment for them. This law became the basis for the UN genocide convention, passed in 1948 and ratified in 1949. The United Nations, formally established in 1945, created the first international forum and institution that, in principle, could effectively combat eliminationist politics, though the United Nations’ initial concerns (preventing war) and deformities (e.g., the Soviet Union’s Security Council veto, the many tyrannies and eliminationist regimes as members) meant it would actually do little. In fact, the establishment of the United Nations and the specific body of law to address mass murder coincided with the Soviet empire’s onset in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviets’ ongoing and potential need to eliminate actual or imagined enemies, rendering Nuremberg’s and then the genocide convention’s substantial rhetorical and paper progress mainly empty symbols. True, at Nuremberg, at the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal and then the successor trials, the most important ones, including of the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, the Americans held, the courts brought some leading mass murderers to justice and punishment. This was also true in the parallel war crimes trial of Japanese by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo and by courts in countries where the Japanese committed their crimes. Yet, all in all, the regime against mass murder set up in the 1940s and essentially unchanged for half a century proved extremely weak, almost mocking what was needed.
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