Great Throughts Treasury

"A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors."

"All we talk about is ?Islamic terrorism.? If the two words are associated for long enough it's obviously going to have an effect on how people think about Muslims."

"A major difference between Srebrenica and previous genocides in the twentieth century was that the massacres strengthened the lobby for intervention and the understanding, already ripening within the Clinton administration, that the U.S. policy of non-confrontation had become politically untenable. Thus, in the aftermath of the gravest single act of genocide in the Bosnian war, thanks to America's belated leadership, NATO jets engaged in a three-week bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs that contributed mightily to ending the war."

"A bias toward belief would do less harm than a bias toward disbelief."

"Al-Majid's forces were fairly predictable. Jets began by dropping cluster bombs or chemical cocktails on the targeted villages. Surviving inhabitants fled. When they reached the main roads, Iraqi soldiers and security police rounded them up. Then they often looted and firebombed the villages so they could never be reoccupied. Some women and children were sent to their deaths; others were moved to holding pens where many died of starvation and disease. Many of the men simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. In the zones that Saddam Hussein had outlawed, Kurdish life was simply extinct."

"Although it did not sell Baghdad weapons, the United States provided intelligence gathered from AWACS early-warning aircraft, which included damage estimates on Iraqi strikes and reports of Iranian troop movements."

"Although China was the state most likely able to affect KR behavior, the Carter administration was not about to risk normalization by carping about the KR's human rights abuses."

"American decision-makers must understand how damaging a foreign policy that privileges order and profit over justice really is in the long term."

"Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued.... America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive."

"America needs a sensible, sustainable Iran policy that can meet U.S. security and economic interests, command international support and withstand the shifting Middle Eastern sands."

"Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call 'issue ownership.'"

"As high as the death toll turned out, it was far lower than if NATO had acted at all. After years of avoiding confrontation, the United States and its allies likely saved hundreds of thousands of lives."

"Anytime you mentioned peacekeeping in Africa, the crucifixes and garlic would come up on every door."

"As even a democracy like the United States has shown, waging war can benefit a leader in several ways: it can rally citizens around the flag, it can distract them from bleak economic times, and it can enrich a country's elites."

"As Lemkin noted, war and genocide are almost always connected."

"Assistant Secretary General Simonovic?s briefing once again illustrates that this crisis was never about protecting the rights of ethnic Russians and was always about one country?s ambition to redraw its own borders."

"Backed by the newly credible threat of military force, the United States was easily able to convince the Serbs to stop shelling civilians. In November 1995, the Clinton administration brokered a peace accord in Dayton, Ohio."

"Asked directly in November 1990 if the United States should go to war, 58 percent said no. Some 62 percent considered it likely that the crisis could 'bog down and become another Vietnam situation.' When the prospect of U.S. casualties was raised, support dropped further. Yet when U.S. troops battled the Iraqi Republican Guard, more than 80 percent backed Bush's decision to fight."

"Because Americans were not endangered by the Turkish horrors and because American neutrality in World War I remained fixed, Washington did not act on Morgenthau's recommendations. Officials urged him instead to seek aid from private sources. Morgenthau did get help from outside the U.S. government. The Congregationalist, Baptist, and Roman Catholic churches made donations. The Rockefeller Foundation gave $290,000 in 1915 alone. And most notable, a number of distinguished Americans, none of Armenian descent, set up a new Committee on Armenian Atrocities. The committee raised $100,000 for Armenian relief and staged high-profile rallies, gathering delegations from more than 1,000 churches and religious organizations in New York City to join in denouncing the Turkish crimes."

"Before I began exploring American's relationship with genocide, I used to refer to U.S. policy toward Bosnia as a 'failure.' I have changed my mind. It is daunting to acknowledge, but this country's consistent policy of nonintervention in the face of genocide offers sad testimony not to a broken American political system but to one that is ruthlessly effective. The system, as it stands now, is working. No U.S. president has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

"Because of [Lemkin's] prior lobbying efforts, the third count of the October 1945 Nuremberg indictment had stated that all twenty-four defendants 'conducted deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories."

"Because the United States gave the KR regime no support, it could not suspend trade or military aid."

"Beginning in March 1971, after Bengali nationalists in East Pakistan's Awami League won an overall majority in the proposed national assembly and made modest appeals for autonomy, Pakistani troops killed between 1 and 2 million Bengalis and raped some 200,000 girls and women. The Nixon administration, which was hostile to India and using Pakistan as an intermediary to China , did not protest."

"Beginning in 1975 and continuing intermittently through the late 1970s, the Iraqis established a 6-12-mile-wide 'prohibited zone' along their border with Iran. Iraqi forces destroyed every village that fell inside the zone and relocated Kurdish inhabitants to the mujamma'at, large army-controlled collective settlements along the main highways in the interior."

"Being an occupier is not good for anybody's global standing. It is a catalyst for terrorist recruitment."

"Bosnian Serb soldiers and militiamen had compiled lists of leading Muslim and Croat intellectuals, musicians, and professionals. And within days of Bosnia 's secession from Yugoslavia , they began rounding up non-Serbs, savagely beating them, and often executing them."

"Beginning on March 24, 1999, NATO jets under the command of General Clark, supreme allied commander for Europe, began bombing Serbia. Allied leaders said they would continue bombing until Milosevic accepted the autonomy compromise. It was the first time in history that the United States or its? European allies had intervened to head off a potential genocide."

"British and U.S. officials and journalists were skeptical about the veracity of 'unsubstantiated information.' In the words of one Swiss foreign editor, 'We received no picture of photographic exactitude, only silhouettes.' In 1944, when John Pehle, the director of Roosevelt's War Refugee Board, wanted to public the report of two Auschwitz escapees, Elmer Davis, the head of the U.S. Office of War Information, turned down his request. The American public would not believe such wild stories, he said, and Europeans would be so demoralized by them that their resistance would crumble."

"Brokenness is the operative issue of our time - broken souls, broken hearts, broken places."

"But one ugly, deadly and recurrent reality check persists: genocide. Genocide has occurred so often and so uncontested in the last fifty years that an epithet more apt in describing recent events than the oft-chanted "Never Again" is in fact "Again and Again." The gap between the promise and the practice of the last fifty years is dispiriting indeed. How can this be? In 1948 the member states of the United Nations General Assembly -- repulsed and emboldened by the sinister scale and intent of the crimes they had just witnessed -- unanimously passed the Genocide Convention. Signatories agreed to suppress and punish perpetrators who slaughtered victims simply because they belonged to an "undesirable" national, ethnic, or religious group. The wrongfulness of such mindful killings was manifest. Though genocide has been practiced by colonizers, crusaders and ideologues from time immemorial, the word "genocide," which means the "killing: (Latin, cide) of a "people" (Greek, genos), had only been added to the English language in 1944 so as to capture this special kind of evil. In the words of Champetier de Ribes, the French Prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, "This [was] a crime so monstrous, so undreamt of in history throughout the Christian era up to the birth of Hitlerism, that the term 'genocide' has had to be coined to define it." Genocide differed from ordinary conflict because, while surrender in war normally stopped the killing, surrender in the face of genocide only expedited it. It was -- and remains -- agreed that the systematic, large-scale massacre of innocents, stands atop any "hierarchy of horribles.""

"By 8 a.m. the morning after the plane crash, we knew what was happening, that there was systematic killing of Tutsi,' Joyce Leader, the deputy chief of mission, recalls. 'People were calling me and telling me who was getting killed. I knew they were going door-to-door.' Back at the State Department, she explained to her colleagues that three kinds of killing were going on: casualties in war, politically motivated murder, and genocide."

"But when NATO helped bring about a role reversal and empowered Albanians to realize their rights and control their own destinies, many Albanian returnees behaved brutally. In the year after the NATO victory, while some 50,000 NATO troops patrolled Kosovo, Albanian extremists expelled more than 100,000 Serbs from their homes in Kosovo and killed some 1,500."

"By late 1991 it was clear that Bosnia (43 percent Muslim, 35 percent Orthodox Serb, and 18 percent Roman Catholic Croat), the most ethnically heterogeneous of Yugoslavia's republics, was in a bind."

"Citizens victimized by genocide or abandoned by the international community do not make good neighbors, as their thirst for vengeance, their irredentism and their acceptance of violence as a means of generating change can turn them into future threats."

"Conducting complex investigations in foreign lands through interpreters years after the crimes and without much pertinent international legal precedent was no easy chore."

"Countries that intervene militarily rarely do so out of pure altruism."

"Contrary to conventional wisdom, the modern media is probably not making intervention more likely. For starters, unlike in cases of famine or natural disaster, genocide can be exceedingly difficult to cover. Despite all the "globaloney" about reporters being "everywhere," stories about the early stages of genocide are often unattainable because the price of accessing such terrain may be the life of the reporter. And even if technological advances -- such as Internet television images or flying, unmanned rescue cameras -- succeed in bringing viewers live genocide, the "CNN effect" will not necessarily translate into louder or wider calls for humanitarian intervention, as television images have both attract and repel concern. On the one hand, as we saw in Bosnia and Rwanda, the publicity given to mass atrocity can attract public interest and pull foreign governments toward intervention. On the other hand, the seeming intractability of the hatreds, the sight of the carnage, the visible danger to anyone who sets foot in the region, and the apparent remoteness of events from American homes can repel American voters and leaders and keep American troops out. In effect, this very tension may explain the United States' tendency to deliver a hearty humanitarian response but nonexistent military response to genocide."

"Citing fears of further Soviet incursions in Africa and eyeing potentially vast oil reserves in Iboland, U.S. officials stalled effective famine relief measures for much of the conflict. The United States insisted that food be delivered through Lagos, even though Nigerian commanders were open about their objectives. 'Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war,' one said. In the end Nigeria crushed the Ibo resistance and killed and starved to death more than 1 million people."

"Dallaire says he got a phone call. A U.S. officer was wondering precisely how many Rwandans had died. Dallaire was puzzled and asked why he [sic] wanted to know. 'We are doing our calculations back here,' the U.S. officer said, 'and one American casualty is worth about 85,000 Rwandan dead.'"

"Democracies are expense-averse and they think in terms of short-term, political interests rather than a long-term interest in stability."

"Despite unprecedented public outcry about foreign brutality, for the next three and a half years the United States, Europe, and the United Nations stood by while some 200,000 Bosnians were killed, more than 2 million were displaced, and the territory of a multiethnic European republic was sliced into three ethnically pure statelets."

"Don?t compare your insides to other people?s outsides. You can do it too!"

"Few of those who attempted to get the leaden machinery of the U.S. government to respond to genocide began as crusaders or even messengers. Most experienced some moment of recognition that improved their vision and moved them out of a state of denial."

"First, senior officials viewed and spun the violence as an insoluble 'tragedy' rather than a mitigatable, deliberate atrocity carried out by an identifiable set of perpetrators. The war, they said, was fueled by bottom-up, ancient, ethnic or tribal hatreds (not by the top-down political machinations of a nationalistic or opportunistic elite), hatreds that had raged for centuries (and, by implication, would rage for centuries more)."

"Engaging Iran won't guarantee improved U.S.-Iranian relations or a more stable Gulf region. But not engaging means more of the same."

"Evidence gathered later indicates that the Serbs did in fact begin their offensive intending only to seize the southern section. But when they realized, to their amazement, that the Western powers would not resist, they opted to plow ahead and gobble the whole pocket."

"For the next three and a half years, the American public would piece together a piece of life behind the Khmer curtain from KR public statements, which were few; from Cambodian radio, which was propaganda; from refugee accounts, which were doubted; and from Western intelligence sources, which were scarce and suspect."

"Fifty years ago a state-centric universe allowed governments to treat their own citizens virtually as they chose within national borders. Today the concept of human rights is flourishing, and the rights of individuals are prized (if not always protected). Across the contemporary legal, political and social landscape, we see abundant evidence of the legitimation of the movement: we see global conventions that outlaw discrimination on the basis of gender and race and outline the rights of refugees and children; a planet-wide ban on land-mines that was sparked by the outrage of a Vermonter; a pair of ad hoc international war crimes tribunals that take certain mass murderers to task; and an abundance of human rights lawyers who have acquired a respected presence at the policy-making table. In short, when it comes to human rights as a whole, states and citizens have traveled vast distances."

"Foreign policy is an explicitly amoral enterprise."

"For many Cambodians, the occupation by the Vietnamese quickly came to feel like a 'liberation' similar to that of Poland by the Soviets after Nazi rule."