\ by Samantha Power

\ Reviews

• 
  Orsodimondo

  U.S.A. E GENOCIDIO
  
  
  Che fine stanno facendo i Rohingya?
  
  Samantha Power è nata in Irlanda nel 1970. Quando aveva dieci anni la sua famiglia si trasferì in USA. Quando ne aveva diciannove stava coronando il suo ‘american dream’: essere una giornalista sportiva (per la CBS), anche se solo leggendo il punteggio. Sullo schermo dello stadio di Atlanta, nel giugno del 1989, passarono le immagini di piazza Tienanmen, e Samantha capì di essere nel posto sbagliato, capì che stava sbagliando, non era lo sport la sua meta.
  Da allora è diventata una delle più importanti studiose dei diritti umani.
  Questo libro ha vinto il premio Pulitzer nel 2003 e da allora è diventato un fondamentale libro di testo nelle più prestigiose università americane.
  
  
  10 000 volti in acciaio punzonato sono distribuiti sul pavimento dello Spazio Vuoto della Memoria, l'unico spazio vuoto del Museo Ebraico di Berlino realizzato da Libeskind in cui è possibile entrare. L'artista israeliano Menashe Kadishman ha dedicato la sua opera non soltanto alle vittime della Shoah, ma a tutte le vittime di guerra e violenze. I visitatori sono invitati a camminare sui volti e ad ascoltare il fragore prodotto dalle lastre di metallo che sbattono l'una contro l'altra e contro le persone che passano. Foto MD'O.
  
  È un lungo saggio di oltre ottocento pagine basato sullo spoglio di migliaia di documenti e su centinaia di interviste a politici e funzionari, nel quale la Power scava a fondo nei genocidi del Secolo Breve, come lo storico Eric Hobsbawm ha definito il Ventesimo Secolo.
  Partendo da quello del popolo armeno in Turchia, passando ovviamente per la Shoah, per arrivare attraverso gli stermini compiuti in Cambogia dai Khmer rossi a quei massacri che la cronaca (e le immagini televisive) hanno reso più familiari negli ultimi anni: i curdi sterminati dai gas di Saddam, l'orrore in Ruanda, la pulizia etnica in Bosnia, quella contro gli albanesi del Kosovo.
  Con un unico filo conduttore, il ruolo, i silenzi e a volte le stesse complicità avute dagli USA in questi genocidi.
  
  
  Tombe collettive al Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda, prima del genocidio del 1994 Murambi Technical School. In questo memoriale sono sepolte circa 50mila vittime. Furono il vescovo e il sindaco a consigliare a circa 65mila tutsi di rifugiarsi all’interno della scuola, dove speravano di essere al sicuro. Invece, chi non fu ucciso sul posto il 21 aprile, lo fu il giorno dopo nella chiesa locale. In seguito le forze di pace francesi scavarono fosse comuni per nasconder ei corpi e sopra ci costruirono un campo da pallavolo. Foto MD'O.
  
  Ma il libro non ha nulla di antiamericano.
  È un libro "pesante" (nella migliore accezione del termine) che aiuta a riflettere sulle tante ipocrisie che le ideologie e la realpolitik del mondo moderno ci hanno imposto; un libro che affronta con coraggio e senza pregiudizi le assurdità degli stermini di massa; un libro che denuncia come anche le migliori democrazie - perfino le migliori oligarchie, come gli US - non sono immuni da colpe, da ritardi, da incomprensioni, da inazione.
  
  Libro fondamentale, splendido, da tenere sempre a portata di mano, da leggere integralmente e poi consultare ogni volta che serve (spesso, ahimé).
  
  
  Foto di Danilo Krstanović.
  
  È agghiacciante quello che scrive e racconta.
  È agghiacciante che succeda e si ripeta ancora.
  
  Ci si riempie la bocca con frasi pregne come MAI PIÙ, JAMAIS PLUS, NEVER AGAIN, le ho viste scritte su bandiere che sventolavano nei luoghi storici: ma succede sempre di nuovo, di qua e di là - restiamo a guardare, anche se qualche voce si alza più rapidamente che in passato.
  Intanto la gente muore e l'orrore si ripete.
  
  PS
  Il termine di "genocidio" nasce dall'isolata (e per anni oscura) lunga tenace difficile battaglia di Raphael Lemkin, un ebreo polacco fuggito in America nel 1941.
  La Convenzione per la prevenzione e la repressione del delitto di genocidio adottata il 9 dicembre 1948 dall’ONU non venne ratificata dagli Stati Uniti per i successivi quaranta anni.
  
  PPSS
  Grande donna, Samantha Power, nonostante l'inutile gaffe che la portò a dover abbandonare la campagna elettorale e lo staff di Barack Obama.
  
  
  L’autrice, Samantha Power, laureata in legge a Yale, corrispondente di guerra in Bosnia, direttore del "Carr Center for Human Rights Policy" di Harvard.
• 
  Mr.

  Samantha Power's 'A Problem from Hell' is a broad attempt to document the major acts of genocide/human rights violations of the 20th century paired with the international community's subsequent negligence in each case. She reports on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and especially her major areas of research- Rwanda and Serbia.
  
  However, Powers is content to simply recount major instances of crimes against humanity that the U.S. and other major Western powers simply ignored (a worthy historical task), rather than to document the major atrocities the U.S. supported/participated in (the far more morally serious and honest task). While she is scrupulous in her documentation of the horrors of Rwanda and Iraq, her sections on Indo-China fail miserably. She provides a lengthy and conventional chapter on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, without mentioning to inform us about the U.S.'s massive contribution to such atrocities (only side references are provided). Additionally, she mentions in a rather depraved manner, that "In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away" (147). In actuality, the U.S. did not look away: it funded the genocide, and President Carter deliberately escalated the intensity of the atrocities. This is the essence of Power's political backwardness. Pointing to the atrocities of official enemies is easy, it is far more difficult and necessary to point to the atrocities of the U.S. and its allies. Nowhere does Powers discuss Israel and the Palestinians, nowhere does she discuss Pinochet, or the Contras, or Kissinger for that matter. So long as the the liberal intelligentsia refuses to stare in the mirror, the world will continue to be an arena of exploitation, injustice, and crimes against humanity.
• 
  Karen

  This is a difficult book to read. Both for its content and length. Most books about genocide are difficult, so this is no surprise. I have read extensively about the Armenian Genocide (Meds Yeghern), and the Shoah, or Holocaust of European Jews. These parts of the book added little to my knowledge. But, the rest of the book was very informative and distressing, relaying the stories of genocide after the world had declared "Never again"!
  These were the stories of the Cambodian, Kurdish, Bosnian, Rwandan, Srebrenica (part of the Bosnian, and Kosovar genocides. The history is made more interesting because these things happened in my lifetime! While I was going about my life, going to school, getting married, and building my career, these slaughters were taking place and being debated and reported on. While I remember bits of some of these tragedies, more about others, I don't remember the details, or what I felt at the time. (I assume horror when the details were finally revealed.) I thus share in the shame of knowing atrocities happened on my watch. I did not protest, write letters, or raise hell! I felt self righteous as I asserted, when reading about the Shoah, that I would have protested, done everything in my power, to make a difference in ending the slaughter. However, I will be one of those future generations will ask about. Why did you do nothing? Very humbling!
  The rest of the book relates the history of Mr. Lemkin, a Polish Jew, who lost family members in the Shoah, who coined the term genocide, and gave the rest of his life working to see this become an international crime, punishable in International Courts as "crimes against humanity". The United States took over 40 years to ratify this United Nations resolution, long after many other countries had done so. The first case of genocide coming before an international tribunal, after the Nuremberg trials, was that involving the Serbs against Muslims in the 1990s!
  We read about the foot dragging of the United States, over and over again, through multiple presidencies, and see how the State Departments response to many atrocities, was exactly the same as their response to the Holocaust/ Shoah! I gained respect for some politicians, and lost some respect for others, who looked the other way, even multiple times!
  The attacks on American soil of 9/11 brought it home in a way like no other. When a group wants to annihilate another group for "who" they are, not for anything they have done, it is Chilling!
  I will end with a quote from the book, which shook me. She was discussing the Rwandan massacre, explaining that they experienced the equivalent of more than two World Trade Center attacks every single day for 100 days! "When, on September 12, 2001, the United States turned for help to its friends around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. When the Tutsi cried out (or the Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Bosnians, Kurds), by contrast, every country in the world turned away."
• 
  Alec

  I have a lot of complaints and very few positive remarks about this book. I'll start with the little good: I enjoyed the biographical information about Raphael Lemkin. That said, there are many other more in-depth books about him out there that could tell an even fuller story.
  
  The majority of this book, however, was a hollow argument for the superiority of liberal interventionism. The structure of each case study goes like this: a genocide started; the US MAY have borne some blame for the conditions that allowed the violence to start; the US didn't intervene; OR the US did intervene and everything went great. The historical background for all the genocides is superficial at best. For example, Power never even addresses the issue of how the Hutu and Tutsi identities came into being in Rwanda. She mentions that there was some animosity based on the structure of the colonial administration and not much else. I understand that the majority of this book was dedicated to the American response to genocides throughout history, but not properly contextualizing the situation is at best a mistake and at worst a deliberate attempt to strengthen an argument. I was amazed that this book was so long, given how little detail she put into the case studies.
  
  Most importantly, though, I think this book operates from an inherently false and dangerous premise. The basic assumption from which the whole book flows is that the US is a world superpower (true) and has the means to stop violence around the world (also true). Few people can dispute those two facts. And yes, the US should make as many efforts as possible to stop violence, especially genocide, around the world. But the US is also one of the leading causes of violence around the world. From Chile in the 1970s to Iraq in the 2000s, the US has been responsible for high levels of violence and human rights abuse. Power doesn't even mention these points, instead focusing on how the US could have stopped other states who were killing people. Presenting only this half of the coin is to portray the US as a state that just hasn't done enough a couple of times to stop these huge acts of violence committed by other states.
  
  That is the danger of this book's premise: propagating the idea that the American government is just a bystander that failed to act, and not a primary source of death and murder. The cases Power points to are correctly labeled as examples of American failure and shame. The US could and should have done more to stop the Rwandan genocide and many others like it. But the US also should not have led the overthrow of many democratically elected governments and inserted strongmen who oppressed and murdered their own citizens (Pinochet and Mobutu, to name two). Not pointing out both of these faults in American foreign policy is, again, either intellectually lazy or worse.
  
• 
  Andrew

  Samantha Power has written a very well-researched book profiling cases of genocide in the 21st century (in Turkey, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda, Balkans, Srebrenica, and Kosovo). Powers descibed the crusade taken on by numerous heroic individuals to avert genocide (none of whom I had previously heard of), such as Raphael Lemkin, William Proxmire, Henry Morgenthau, and James Kenneth Galbraith.
  
  Power not only describes the recognition and responses to genocide in each of the case studies profiled, but she also describes the birth of the word genocide and the UN treaty that criminalized it. We take for granted the recognition and definition of the term "genocide", but at the time of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, the word did not even exist. We also take for granted the existence of a UN treaty condemning genocide, but it took 40 years after UN adoption for the US to even ratify the treaty, fearing that accusations of genocide might be brought against the US.
  
  Power reveals many examples of the impotence of the United Nations (particularly the United States) in preventing or intervening in mass killings in the 20th century. Not until national interests were in jeopardy (and after genocide had already taken a heavy toll) did the United States and the international community act. For example, not until American oil interests in Kuwait were threatened did the United States intervene against Iraq in its extermination of the Kurds. The Anfal Campaign of 1988 carried out by Saddam Hussein killed ~150,000 Kurds and importantly was carried out with chemical weapons; yet, the US showed a range of reactions (that typify its response to the other atrocities as well): denial, blame of the victims, hope that perpetrators could be swayed, downplaying of the accusations, and simply inaction. In the end, there was insurmountable (with rare exceptions) inertia to even condemning acts of genocide.
  
  Power is critical of previous American presidents (particularly hard on G. Bush I and Bill Clinton) for their inaction, but she is balanced in her lambast. She provides sufficient details on the political climate and internal debates in the various administrations that provides contexts in which the decisions to not intervene took place. She frequently concedes ground to counterpoints, such as the idea that action might actually exacerbate genocide. This adds depth to her book and gives her credibility as a realist rather than some hippie liberal.
  
  The book does not get a 5/5 from me because of the lack of coverage of atrocities that the US contributed to. Powers asserts numerous times that the US was concerned that "rogue" states might bring up genocide charges against the US, but she did not elaborate on the validity of these claims. The US was complicit in and contributed to genocide carried out by Pinochet in Chile and the military in Guatemala, among others. Also, US treatment of Native Americans could also be counted as a genocide. None of these accounts were mentioned. These inconvenient aspects of our history is crucial in understanding why the United States dragged its feet on ratifying the UN treaty on genocide and why the US voted against the creation of the International Criminal Court, a permanent tribunal to prosecute genocide and other crimes against humanity. These details are important int understanding why the United States has been so inept in responding to these human atrocities, but were not covered.
  
  I would describe my political views as that of a pacifist, but this book has turned me towards the idea of the need for a truly independent international body (rather than the UN) that can and will intervene militarily to avert genocide.
  
  All in all, this was a stellar piece of investigative work that taught me a lot about the history of genocide. The progress in making genocide history is painstakingly slow, but the progress is apparent and of course the hope that the world will be able to shake inertia toresponding to genocide in the future.
• 
  Ana

  Samantha Power is an Irish born, American raised woman who served in a myriad of important posts within the US Government, including US Ambassador to the United Nations. Given her high status and delicate position, you wouldn't be blamed if you thought that she, like many others who held public office, would NOT write a book about how absolutely disgusting the US behaviour has been with regards to genocide. And yet she did. And this book is it. The size and scope of this work is huge - Armenia, Holocaust, Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda and Bosnia are all covered - and meaningful details are cleverly pushed forward so the reader can understand situations, people and policies. The author's tone is clear, stern, demanding on the mind but totally appropriate for the topic she is discussing. More importantly, although the book is highly biased - it blames the US for an immense amount of mistakes - it is not pedantic or excessively angry. It is, instead, sharp in its indictment. For those interested in the subject, this is a necessary read, and one which will open your eyes to the inability of the "greatest power in the world" to live up to its name.
• 
  Bob

  Samantha Power gives a compelling account of the twentieth century history of genocide and American responses (largely non-responses) to this horrendous evil. She covers a sobering reality with a journalists skill of both careful documentation and rendering a riveting narrative.
  
  She begins with the life of Rafael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who became fascinated at the crimes against humanity wrought by the Turks against Armenians in World War 1. Fleeing Poland when he recognizes the same patterns in the Third Reich, he suffered the loss of most of his family and became a lifelong advocate against these crimes, to which he gave the term "genocide". His crowning achievement was to participate in the drafting of the UN conventions against genocide.
  
  And so we come to the US response. Lemkin died in 1959 without seeing the US ratify these conventions, which would have done so much to strengthen the world's response to genocide. We see the bloody regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the war-weary non-response of the US. Ultimately, our former enemies, the Vietnamese brought down this bloody regime and exposed their crimes. Only in 1985, after Reagan's disastrous visit to Bitburg did he push for the passage of the genocide conventions, although in a qualified form to protect the US against genocide charges.
  
  Sadly, even the Holocaust, even Cambodia are insufficient to arouse the conscience of the US. Power documents a studied avoidance by our political leaders, that discounts evidence of genocide, that equivocates on calling these crimes "genocide", that fails to use even US diplomatic and economic influence against genocide, and is unwilling to risk American lives to save the lives of the thousands who died in the successive genocides she chronicles in Kurdish Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. By and large, Power chalks this up to a determination that American interests were not directly involved, resulting in the moral equivocations to justify inaction.
  
  The latter part of the book chronicles what can happen when the US does act, as it finally did in Kosovo. Goaded by political opposition, the Clinton administration authorized US involvement with NATO bombings and subsequent peace-keeping efforts that brought an end to the Milosevic regime's efforts to exterminate or "cleanse" the land of Albanians in Kosovo. And subsequently it supported the seizure of Milosevic and many other war criminals to be tried for genocide at the Hague. Very belatedly Rafael Lemkin's dream is realized.
  
  The book ends in 2002, just after 9/11. Since then we have witnessed genocide in the South Sudan, and a current ominous situation in the Central African Republic. Samantha Power is now US ambassador to the United Nations and a senior official in the Obama administration. It will be interesting to see whether Power can change from the inside the culture of inaction she decried from the outside.
• 
  Lightreads

  Grinding, grueling, exhausting account of a series of genocides and the United States's response – or generally lack thereof.
  
  Other people have criticized this book at length for failing to address the ways the United States was actively complicit in genocidal violence through support of its perpetrators. The criticism is accurate, though I think it's a product of the focus of this book very specifically on passive complicity.
  
  I had read excerpts of this over the years, and I'm glad I finally sat down and went through all of it, cover-to-cover. But this is a first generation book, and now I want the fifth generation, or the seventh generation, if you know what I mean. Because Power spends a lot of time documenting American disinterest in mass death, and some time talking about the reasons, but the reasons are very . . . cerebral. This economic interest, that political exigency, a few general comments about racism.
  
  This book made me think a lot about pain, and being the observer of it. I mean, most of us catch glimpses of indescribable anguish out of the corners of our eyes all the time, but we've developed defensive emotional blinders. But once in a while, someone looks at the newspaper headline that ten thousand other people read and forgot, and that one person is seared. Irrevocably changed just by knowing that five thousand people halfway around the world were "disappeared." I've known some people like that, and worked with them. One of them was the first person to make me read excerpts of this book.
  
  I want the book about those people. And the contextual, psychological, physiological, etc. differences between them and the rest of us. And the book that takes a deeper, more honest look at the psychology of passive complicity, not just its economic logic. Because Power wrote mostly about when and where and who, and left me pretty messed up over why.
  
• 
  Ann

  This book does a good job of documenting some of the genocides in the 20th century but offers little insight into how they could have been prevented or how our current systems failed. There is larger missing problem which is never addressed in this book, which is how we can respond more quickly and positively in the future.
  
  There is no examination of international law as it exists today, how it works and does not work. There is no mention of Russia and China's role on the security council and how that impacts actions or lack of actions taken regarding genocides. There is no mention of the limitations of the Hague. I was very disappointed in this book as it was touted as offering insight into a very complex problem. Perhaps I expected too much, but the synopsis seemed to offer what wasn't found in the text. Reports by NGO's like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch offer better insight into much of the politics, diplomacy and dynamics surrounding these complex situations.
  
  In the final analysis this appears to be largely a history book told from the prospective of a journalist documenting the events but adding little context or insight into the politics surrounding the events.
• 
  Philip Yancey

  Samantha Power held high offices in recent administrations, and wrote a memoir on her time in government. This book, on genocides all through the 20th century, is informative and deeply disturbing--especially after I visited Cambodia, site of one of the worst genocides.
  
• 
  Vidur Kapur

  In this forcefully argued book, Samantha Power urges the United States to place humanitarian objectives at the centre of its foreign policy agenda, and warns against narrowly defined conceptions of the US "national interest" which have often served to prevent the United States from intervening whilst genocides have taken place. It is well-argued, extremely well-documented, and Power attempts to engage with the strongest arguments against her position. One exception to this is that she does not really grapple with the question of whether it is right for the West to bypass the UN Security Council (if necessary) when carrying out a military intervention. Thus, while her section on Kosovo addressed many of the arguments levelled against that controversial intervention, the legal aspect was not addressed.
  
  For a book which won the Pulitzer Prize and earned plaudits from across the political spectrum, it is noticeably radical. Like Noam Chomsky, Power accuses the United States government - or rather many individuals within it - of repeatedly being complicit in genocide due to concern for US economic and strategic interests, as well as US lives, outweighing concern for hundreds of thousands of innocent victims. For example, when criticising the US for its failure to prevent Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds, she writes that "U.S. patience would have worn thin far sooner if not for American farming, manufacturing and geopolitical interests in Iraq".
  
  Comparisons between Samantha Power and Noam Chomsky may appear to be far-fetched; after all, Chomsky is a dissident while Power was the US Ambassador to the United Nations from 2013-2017. Yet, Power herself - while criticizing what she perceives to be Chomsky's reflexive anti-Americanism - endorses his core framework in a
  2004 review of his book, Hegemony or Survival:
  
  

  ...it is essential to demand, as Chomsky does, that a country with the might of the United States stop being so selective in applying its principles... he is right to demand that officials in Washington devote themselves more zealously to strengthening international institutions, curbing arms flows and advancing human rights.

  
  
  This explains why some on the US right opposed her appointment as Obama's UN Ambassador. The similarities between her views and Noam Chomsky's were noted more than once by right-wing columnists. Moreover, on questioning before the appointment,
  she had to repeatedly disavow things she had written about the United States being an "empire", and on the need for “a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United States.”
  
  Of course, this isn't to say that her book was endorsed by the Chomskyite left. Far from it. When the late Howard Zinn, who was another darling of the anti-imperialist left,
  wrote (before going on to criticise her) that "Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by their inaction", Edward Herman (who was an occasional co-author of Chomsky's)
  wrote a ferocious response to him, calling Power a member of the "cruise missile left" and accusing her of ignoring genocides and other atrocities that the US had not merely been indifferent to, but had actively condoned, supported or carried out.
  
  While it is true that the Vietnam War did not get much attention, Power does acknowledge that the US bombing of Cambodia helped to lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge. And, contrary to Herman's assertion, the US-backed Indonesian genocide of 1965-66 does get a mention, albeit a brief one. That said, it is true that there is no mention of the genocide committed in Guatemala, backed by the US, while the genocide in East Timor (again, condoned by the US) is only briefly mentioned by Power.
  
  In other words, those on the Chomskyite left bitterly complain that Power focuses on genocides committed by "them", but not by "us". Or, to put it another way, Power focuses on the US Government's sins of omission as opposed to their sins of commission. Despite this, around the time of this book's publication, Power did talk of "crimes committed, sponsored or permitted by the United States". Moreover, those who identify as members of the "anti-imperialist" left do the exact opposite to what they accuse Power of doing. As she writes in the aforementioned 2004 review: "For Chomsky, the world is divided into oppressor and oppressed. America, the prime oppressor, can do no right, while the sins of those categorized as oppressed receive scant mention."
  
  In my submission, we can bypass this debate by acknowledging that both Power and Chomsky have something to offer citizens of Western countries who support a humane and ethical foreign policy that is less beholden to economic, strategic and special interests. In some cases, this may require military intervention. In others, it may not. A Problem From Hell is not the final word on how US foreign policy should be conducted, but it is an extremely valuable contribution to the debate, and should be judged on its own merits; neither its supposed omissions nor Power's actions in her subsequent career at the heart of the US Government are valid reasons to dimiss the book as it stands.
• 
  Tomas Bella

  Výnimočná a výnimočne dôležitá kniha. Detailný príbeh vzniku konceptu genocídy, medzinárodnej intervencie a príbeh genocíd 20. storočia (Arméni, Kambodža, Rwanda, Bosna, Kosovo) a americkej reakcie a nereakcie na ne.
  Ak vás trápia otázky, prečo "niekto niečo" neurobil v Rwande alebo Sarajeve, tak tu je nepríjemná odpoveď: nemáme žiadnu jednoduchú odpoveď typu "nebola tam ropa" alebo "mocným na životoch nezáleží", ale vždy je to komplikovaný výsledok činnosti alebo nečinnosti množstva rôznych úradníkov a politikov s veľmi rôznymi názormi na to, čo sa vlastne deje a čo sa s tým dá alebo nedá urobiť.
  Z definície sa autorka venuje oblastiam, kde západ nezasiahol a udiali sa hrozné veci, nie tým, kde zasiahol a udiali sa tiež - autorka sa snaží neustále vysvetľovať aj argumenty proti zásahom, ale vzhľadom na výber najväčších zverstiev modernej doby je to nakoniec 500 strán argumentov za americké humanitárne intervencie. Bez ohľadu na to, čo si o nich myslíte, mimoriadne dielo.
  Pulitzerova cena za non-fiction 2003, 10 rokov po napísaní sa autorka stala veľvyslankyňou USA pri OSN.
• 
  Sugavanesh Balasubramanian

  A seminal work with a lot of deep background and direct quotes.
  
  "America's interests" - this term perversely presents itself all over the place where, "America is the vanguard of Liberty everywhere" should have been present. It is also explained well how much of this inaction had zero political consequences.
  
  These are hard choices to make. Because there is no way to know in advance how it's going to turn out. But it doesn't mean no action is an option. - This is basically the gist of the message that is conveyed time and again.
  
  It's interesting to note the biases and how ambivalent or indifferent the US Political Apparatus (with its 'American Interests' driven agenda) or UN (with its toothless, peacekeeping missions) deals with conflicts in different regions. How inspite of all this, emotional, revolutionary bureaucrats turned the tide, roused attention and tried to bring justice/peace (more often the second one than the first one).
• 
  Rebecca

  Every American should read this book twice! It is exceptionally well written, well researched, and unbelievably compelling. It explains the history of America's place in international law and polics from the Armenian genocide of WWI to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. It tells the compelling personal stories of those involved on the international stage, and behind the scenes. This book is exceptionally well balanced. It neither praises nor villifies the United States. Rather, its purpose is to inform the American public about American foreign policy, and to help non-Americans understand why America takes the actions - or inactions that it does. Every American should read this book!
• 
  Chris Walker

  Actually more like a 4.5, but I rounded up because it's a book I think that many people (but especially Americans) should read.
  
  It's been a long time since I've read such a well constructed, well argued, and thoroughly damning analysis of US foreign policy. Samantha Power lays out an accessible, data-rich take on the history of genocide in the 20th-century, focused on American foreign policy decisions, or more frequently the lack thereof. The book is structured chronologically, beginning with the Armenian genocide, progressing through the Holocaust and Raphael Lemkin's creation of the word "genocide" and his tireless work to get the United Nations to pass a convention on genocide, then through the genocides of the Cambodians, Kurdish, Bosnian muslims, Rwandans, and Kosovar Albanians. With the exception of the chapter on the Armenians, which is unfortunately brief, Power breaks down the historical events, and specifically the stages of American reaction to them. She does an excellent job of not lumping together these different situations into one simplistic series of cause and effect. Rather she takes into account the various historical and cultural complexities, and how they combined to produce similar inaction on the part of the US. Her overall thesis is that America's continuous inaction in the face of genocide is not a failure of their foreign policy strategy, but rather the way it is intended to work. She also doesn't lay out a simplistic hindsight vision that the US would have absolutely been able to prevent genocide in every case, but she does argue that the calculations policymakers took into account had little to do with that possibility one way or the other. And when they were doubtful about whether or not they could have affected things positively, it often had more to do with a desire to stay uninvolved, rather than an honest analysis of the situation.
  
  Rather than try to explain in a paragraph what Power's lays out in 500+ pages, I'll leave you a particularly blunt and straightforward quote from her conclusion:
  
  

  The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it. The U.S. policies crafted in response to each case of genocide examined in this book were not the accidental products of neglect. They were concrete choices made by this country's most influential decisionmakers after unspoken and explicit weighing of costs and benefits
• 
  Ярослава

  Тільки лінивий не сміявся над риторикою глибокої стурбованості, серйозного занепокоєння і постійної тривоги, до якої вдається міжнародна спільнота замість того, щоб завдати хоч якусь користь. Втім, багатьом із нас ні з чим порівнювати - скажімо, я не відстежувала реакцію цієї спільноти на інші трагедії. Тож для перспективи я з інтересом прочитала «A Problem from Hell” Саманти Пауер - тієї Саманти Пауер, яку ми всі ніжно любимо, постпредставниці США.
  Свою кар'єру Саманта Пауер починала як журналістка під час Боснійської війни. Вона зблизька спостерігала за етнічними чистками - серби послідовно винищували боснійське мусульманське населення - але найбільший акт геноциду, що розгорнувся після захоплення безпечної зони у Сребрениці, проґавила, бо не могла собі такого й уявити. Коли вбивства іще тривали, знайомий журналіст спитав її,чи справді серби вбили вже тисячу мусульман, вона сказала, що то напевно неправда. То справді була неправда: насправді ж вбито було 7 тисяч.
  Так вона й зацікавилася реакціями офіційної Америки на геноциди - і на вірменський (власне, то ще й до появи слова «геноцид»), і на новіші, вже після Голокосту (Руанда, винищення курдів у Іраку, Камбоджа, серби проти боснійських мусульман і проти албанців у Косово).
  Отже, спойлер: ми можемо переставати сміятися над міжнародним глибоким занепокоєнням, для нас зробили швидше і більше, ніж робили для багатьох інших країн у значно страшніших ситуаціях. У порівнянні з тим, як зазвичай буває, у нас все геть ок - і ситуація краща, й реакція швидша.
  Отже, загальна картина така: Америка ніколи не втручалася в перебіг подій, щоб запобігти геноциду, і навіть вкрай рідко його засуджувала в процесі (й однією з останніх ратифікувала конвенцію ООН із запобігання геноциду). Часті заклики «Ніколи більше» перетворилися, за словами одного журналіста, на констатацію «німці ніколи більше не убиватимуть євреїв у Європі у 1940ві». Решта вільні робити, що їм заманеться.
  На бездіяльність є кілька причин, і її виправдовують на кілька повторюваних способів. Американським політикам, журналістам і широкому загалу бракує уяви, щоб уявити собі насильство у такому масштабі, й вони натомість до останнього вірять у традиційну дипломатію і переговори. Вони вважають, що цивільне населення, яке не провокує насильства, заціліє, тож спонукають до перемир'їв і жертвують гроші на правозахисні організації. Крім того, своя сорочка ближче до тіла, широкий загал завжди у внутрішніх потребах зацікавлений більше, ніж у зовнішніх, тож невтручання зазвичай не несе з собою жодних ризиків, а втручання - несе. Щоб зменшити й без того малі ризики від невтручання, дипломати починають подавати насильство за кордоном як двостороннє, а не як односторонню агресію чи геноцид (в Боснії подавали конфлікт як «задавнений» і «безвихідий», а представник ООН Акаші навіть звинуватив мусульман, яких в той момент заривали в братські могили, у провокаціях). Крім того, всі звикли перевіряти інформацію з кількох незалежних джерел, що, очевидно, неможливо у випадку свідчень, скажімо, біженців, тож серйозність становища мінімізують, наголошуючи на фрагментарності даних. Це загальники, далі Пауер конкретно розглядає кожен окремий випадок (чому не втручатися здавалося тактично розумнішим, хто виступав за втручання, як змінювалося зображення в медіа і т.д.)
  Коротше кажучи, у порівнянні з масштабними тупняками або свідомим заплюющуванням очей, які відбувалися навколо останніх кількох геноцидів, міжнародна спільнота в нашому випадку просто неймовірно швидко знаходить сателітні фото російських частин під нашим кордоном і т.д. Тож чтиво неймовірно депресивне, але конкретно в нашому випадку вселяє надію, що нас не налаштовані кидати напризволяще - якщо вони в принципі кидали напризволяще людей у суттєво гіршому становищі.
  
• 
  Regina

  Genocide did not even exist as a term until Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish Polish lawyer and survivor of the Holocaust, invented the term after the close of World War II. Before that time, Churchill described it as a "crime with no name". The best that was offered was "barbarities" and "vandalisms" which lacked moral authority. It wasn't until 1948 that the UN was finally able to come up with a working definition of "genocide". Genocide was not entered into force as a UN Convention until 1951 and it would be 40 more years before it would be ratified ("with reservations") by the United States.
  
  The twentieth century saw many genocides stack up before there was ever a single person brought to account: Pol-Pot's Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, Hussein's use of chemical weapon's against the Kurds, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. The notion that the US could not intervene due to an inability to effect change, the possible risks, or the lack of political will are shown to be grossly inaccurate. Not only is there a moral imperative to face genocide up front but the facts tend to show that appeasing genocidal leaders only leads to more genocide. One genocide leads to another. The victimized populations lead to revenge and greater use of violence and become havens for terrorist organizations.
  
  I wish I could have read an updated version. Written over a decade ago, A Problem From Hell is still incredibly instructive and holds many lessons for future foreign policy in regards to genocide. Since the book was written, there has been the first warrant for a sitting Head-of-State, Omar al-Bashir in Darfur.
• 
  Nebuchadnezzar

  This book really consists of two parts. One is a documentation of the birth and evolution of the concept of "genocide" during the 20th century. Power's access to documentation and powerful players in international affairs gives her unique insight into the issue. The chapters on the Armenian genocide in Turkey are especially timely given the still ongoing denial of this historical atrocity.
  
  However, this is all ultimately used in support of an insidious agenda dressed up in humanitarian language. Power is offering up a repackaged Wilsonianism, a call to arms for the liberal hawks. She commits some egregious acts of omission and whitewashing of American complicity in genocidal actions (e.g., Native Americans, Indonesia, Iraq). By the end of the book, the reader is treated to what is essentially a manifesto for what Edward S. Herman called the "cruise-missile left." (
  http://www.zcommunications.org/the-cr...)
  
  There is a lot of informative and well-written material on the issue of genocide here, but a good bit of it needs to be read with a skeptical eye and the author's political agenda in mind (though I'd say that could easily apply to any book of this nature).
• 
  fourtriplezed

  A very very good book indeed and as much as I disagree with interventionism personally I cannot fault Powers well reasoned points of view.
• 
  Huyen

  so again, I'm sucked into a book that angers and saddens me. Samantha Power demonstrates that despite the lofty (but rhetorical) pledge "never again" after the Holocaust, the US gov and state leaders have never ever been willing to prevent or stop any genocide in the twentieth century. the systematic inaction and indifference of the US gov and the UN in the face of the plights of the Kurds, Cambodians, Tutsis, Kosovars and Bosnian Muslims are invariably characteristic when realpolitik remains the lingua franca of Washington and all US presidents. It takes extraordinary individuals like Henry Maugenthau, Raphael Lemkin, Peter Galbraith, Bob Dole, McCloskey to push a polls-obsessed government into action. But apart from unusual supposed "success" story the belated bombing in Srebrenica in 1995 (3 years after Milosevic's vicious "ethnic cleansing" campaign started with more than 200,000 Muslims cherished in despair) and the hyper-cautious aerial bombings in Kosovo in 1999, America has largely sat on the sideline with all sorts of rationalizations of unspeakable inhumanity elsewhere. Not only indifferent like in the case of Rwanda, the US also indirectly supported genocidal regimes like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge or Saddam. And when thousands of people died unnecessarily, policymakers busied themselves squabbling over if these genocidal acts constituted genocide and justified America's nonintervention by a future quagmire or jeopardy.
  However, the most important point Samantha Power brings home to me is that as impossible as it sounds to deter these disasters, these bloodthirsty maniacs are also vulnerable and sensitive to reactions of the international community. It's the passivity and reluctance to act that embolden them to continue their killing spree. even the most symbolic gesture from world leaders can make a difference, but the truth is that those suckers REALLY DON'T FUCKING CARE or bother to condemn these assholes. Half-hearted efforts and fixation with casualties on "our" side often preclude bold actions necessary to provide safety for civilians or bring war criminals to justice. to be honest, the book gives me some hope, not in the remote possibility of humanity of monsters, but in the power of public opinion in urging their leaders to act to prevent massacre, like Clinton in 1995 and 1999.
  But apart from all the very well-documented facts and info, there is one thing Power never mentions, China...
• 
  Erik Graff

  I've been helping a friend clear out an old two-storey, five-car garage recently acquired by the condominium association she heads. Amongst various items ranging from sex toys to a truck engine were a number of books, this among them. I picked it up and read it not knowing that Samantha Power has gone on to become the U.S. representative to the United Nations. Back when she wrote it she was simply an academic with a background in journalism including work in the former Yugoslavia.
  
  Power's experiences in Bosnia apparently inspired her to write this history of genocide. Beginning with the Armenians during WWI and ending with Kosovo, she traces the evolution of the concept into international law whereby signatory states are ostensibly required to act to prevent such activity. Here she focuses on the United States, a late, a very late signatory (and that with amendments and qualifications), and its history of weaseling out of its obligations under the law by the denial of the obvious.
  
  What I didn't know before reading this book is that the criteria for a judgment of genocide concern the intent to destroy a culture and acts towards that end, acts which do not necessarily involve mass homicide but may include such things as forced sterilization, separation of the sexes, rape and the destruction of cultural institutions such as libraries, museums, temples, schools etc.
  
  One hopes that Ms. Power remains firm in her convictions...
• 
  Siria

  Fascinating, passionate, and damning in equal measure, A Problem from Hell is an indictment against the prevailing attitudes in the USA (and much of the west) towards genocide throughout the twentieth century. From the Turkish massacres of the Armenians, through to the Serbian butchery in Kosovo, Power examines the ways in which American politicians have paid lip-service to opposing genocide, while failing to act for reasons of political expediency. As Power writes: "No US President has ever made genocide prevention a priority, and no US President has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." She makes a very compelling moral argument as to why military intervention is sometimes necessary to ensure that lives are saved, and why the US should use its pre-eminent global position to bring about that intervention. I did, however, wonder why Power chose to focus on examples of genocide which placed Washington as a rather remote outsider, a quasi-isolationist, removed from complicity in the causes of genocide—East Timor and Guatemala are two sad examples—why not also look at the suffering American militarism and complicity have caused?
• 
  Jessica

  I tend to get really depressed in the winter, and this year I just thought well.... why not?
• 
  Tim Hoiland

  It won a Pulitzer for a reason.
• 
  sarah

  maybe people are just bad
• 
  Steve

  A Problem from Hell is a magisterial yet approachable work on the history of the term "genocide", the creation and fight for ratification of a genocide convention at the United Nations, and the explanation and criticism of the subsequent responses to instances of genocide by the United States during the last quarter of the 20th Century. It is written by Samantha Power, a journalist at the time of writing who would go on to become President Obama's second Ambassador to the United Nations. It is an exceptional book which should be read by anyone looking to better understand the history of genocide and the wider American response to it. I feel it is required reading for those wanting to better understand American policy at the end of the 20th Century.
  
  Power starts out with presenting a history of how the idea of the term "genocide" came to be, beginning with the atrocities imposed on the Armenians by the Turks at the beginning of the century. We quickly see how the use of certain labels and terms for defining what happened would become controversial moving forward. We of course then progress into the Holocaust period and how the campaign for awareness of Hitler's intentions before the war were made and rebuffed, and the subsequent quest for justice during and after WWII. This leads us to an enlightening segment on Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who sought refuge in the US during the war and dedicated the rest of his life to creating the term "genocide" and writing and getting ratified a convention on the act by the member nations of the UN.
  
  We get to see how Lemkin struggled to get the big powers to sign on to his convention, even after the horrors of the concentration camps were discovered and shocked the world. He worked tirelessly in the halls of power lobbying his case. The United States was one of his most difficult targets; it is difficult to make the most powerful country in the world at that time give up even a sliver of its own sovereignty, even for a cause as obviously just as this. Power does an excellent job presenting the arguments Lemkin makes and the US attempts to rebuff or avoid them.
  
  Following the narrative of how the term comes to be, Power follows with a number of instances portraying how the United States, and at times the United Nations and the wider world, responded to subsequent occurrences of genocide with little to no action, and why. It is a fascinating story, policy- and history-wise. We begin with the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia (the US wanted NOTHING else to do with Southeast Asia at that point); Iraq and the 1987-88 gassing and cleansing of the Iraqi Kurds (well it's an internal matter, and the US sure wouldn't want to do anything to disrupt Iraq's war with Iran at that time); and next up is Bosnia and the beginning of the Yugoslav wars (eh, this is the UN's problem. It's them that can decide to do nothing about it).
  
  Then we come to the Rwandan genocide in 1994. This part is particularly interesting because it depicts just how much the disastrous "Black Hawk Down" episode in Somalia in October of 1993 affected a US/UN policy of non-intervention moving forward. After Somali militias shot down two US helicopters searching for a warlord in broad daylight over the capital of Mogadishu, killing a number of American soldiers and leading to a photo being published worldwide of the corpse of an American serviceman being dragged naked through the streets by a mob, the US administration lost all appetite for any intervention in the affairs of an African state which might lead to violence and more American GIs being injured, killed or captured. Once the genocidal tempest exploded in Rwanda in April 1994, the UN actually DECREASED it's force there and the Americans refused to send in well-armed and well-trained troops to battle Rwanda citizens wielding clubs and machetes. The perpetrators were left to run wild, killing over 800,000 of their fellow citizens over 100 days. The slaughter was only stopped when a rebel army invaded from neighboring Uganda and captured Kigali, the Rwandan capital. The US administration was adamant about not shedding more US blood on African soil and losing face at home and on the world stage. And in the 1990s, as America went, so went the West.
  
  Power next examines the response to the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995 in the midst of the Bosnian (Yugoslav) war. This particular massacre stood out because of the sheer size (7,000 men and boys over almost two weeks) and because the UN troops stations nearby did nothing to stop it. It shown a light on just how futile and toothless UN protection and peacekeeping efforts could be. Power finally tells the story of the invasion of Kosovo by the Serbs in 1999. The invading militias attempted to cleanse Kosovo of ethnic Albanians and other Muslims to be left for the minority Serb population. Finally, after issuing ultimatums and having them continuously broken, the US under the auspices of NATO sent bombers to attack Serb positions and halt the slaughter. It appears that some lessons were finally learned, far too late, not much better.
  
  Power does an excellent job of laying out facts of each episode, through interviews with primary sources, documented government communications, media reports, etc. so that it doesn't appear that she is just heaping on the blame. She doesn't let her activist's passion seep into her journalistic ethos. The decisions made by those in power were excruciatingly difficult. But it is clear that this work highlights what can only be described as a collective disregard for the welfare and human rights of the meek and the forgotten, by those best situated to help them: the most powerful military entities on the planet. The lofty ideals and commitments to justice that these countries, in particular the US, espoused during the Cold War world were discarded, time and again, for fear of losing face or political standing. It seems like the decline of the United States' desire to be the "policemen of the world" began here.
  
  Make no mistake, this is a tough book to read. Though Power focuses much of her time on policy and decision making, especially later in the book, she must set the stage with graphic reports of the atrocities being committed during each episode of genocide. I've actually studied genocide in the 20th Century for some time, especially the Khmer Rouge and Rwanda, and I was taken aback by some of the descriptions, especially of the Bosnian conflict. I can only imagine that for someone unfamiliar with genocide reporting that parts of this book will be difficult to get through.
  
  However, if one wants to understand how events like mass slaughter and atrocity are allowed to happen in a post-WWII world, this book is absolutely invaluable. Power's journalism is exceptional, top-notch work from being on the ground during some of the conflicts to following up with sources involved years later. Take your time, work your way through it and find a better comprehension of how these episodes are allowed to happen, defined and ultimately dealt with. It helps you learn a lot about the world.
• 
  Robert Morris

  This book was a lot better than I expected it to be. But its influence has been deeply malign. And it's one of the most influential foreign policy books of the century. Samantha Power has one of the most tragic arcs in American politics. The formative event of her professional life seems to be covering the 1990s genocide of the Bosnians as a young journalist. She came to prominence with this Pulitzer prize winning book, covering the origin and evolution of the concept of genocide, and diving deep on Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Saddam Hussein's Kurdish Genocide, and Cambodia. Her clear moral voice, brilliant writing, and status as an attractive woman vaulted her into power. And during her time in power she played a leading role in creating the slaughters in Syria, Yemen and Libya, the first two of which have a higher body count than anything that happened in Yugoslavia or Iraqi Kurdistan. When you add up the knock on effects across the Sahel, the destruction of Libya, the conflict most inspired by Power's "responsibility to protect" influence, has probably killed more people than died in Yugoslavia and Kurdistan as well.
  
  I've been admonished in the past to point out that "responsibility to protect" (RTP) is not Power's invention. It's a long-standing idea in foreign policy. But I do think it's fair to say that Power has been its most prominent advocate and avatar over the past decade. She joined the Obama administration, on the National Security Council during the Libya intervention, and serving as the US Ambassador to the United Nations for most of Obama's second term. This book and its ideas were a big part of earning her those positions. "A Problem From Hell" documents real problems, but the way it was used by the Obama administration was deeply sinister. Power's version of RTP became the Democrat's justification for continuing Bush II's insane militarism. It allowed the Democrats to continue the weapons manufacturing gravy train while quietly shutting down the anti-war movement of the Bush years. In a famous speech at the United Nations, she basically ran through the table of contents of her book "Russia's doing a Halabja, they're doing a Srebrenica!" in an effort to shame Russia over a war than the US government had started, and prolongs to this day.
  
  So how is the book? Well, I think some of the standard critiques are a bit off base. They're not wrong that she tends to ignore genocides that the US actively covered up, but this isn't really a book about Genocide. This is a book about the US government, and how it was convinced to overcome Vietnam syndrome to use its power more forcefully. Every chapter features a heroic American (or Canadian) bureaucrat whose mission it is to make the world safer for American bombs. So it makes sense that the book, published in 2001, never mentions the Indonesia massacre of communists in the 1960s. Very few people thought of it as a genocide at the time, and it really only reached nerd popular consciousness in the 2010s. She does make glancing references to the US sponsored massacres in Bangladesh and East Timor. But these never became big issues for the US government as genocides, so they don't really fit with the book.
  
  Cambodia is included because it is one of the most horrific things that ever happened, and it helped to form a lot of the institutions and personalities that eventually succeeded in making Genocide something the US would bomb people over. Cambodia became a big part of Senator Proxmire's crusade to get the US to sign the UN genocide convention. Most of the book is about the humanitarian intervention politics of the late 80s and 1990s. And within that context, Power is actually quite critical of the US government, castigating Reagan and Bush for their support for Saddam Hussein and the Khmer Rouge (!) and taking Clinton to task for his weakness. Of course, Power is always critiquing the US government for not bombing enough, but she's not uncritical.
  
  It's interesting to read a book that over-achieved its mission. The 1990s that she describes in this book is a Utopia from my anti-interventionist position. A Congress that still insists on approving every military adventure? Compare that to today, when even the most foreign policy oriented senators can greet the deaths of US soldiers with surprise that we were even in the country they died in. A Pentagon that works hard to avoid getting into wars? Compare that with the near mutiny at Trump and Biden's ending of the Afghanistan gravy train last year, or the glee with which the Joint Chiefs assassinated a powerful Iranian general in 2020, nearly starting our third trillion dollar Middle East war this century. Power's quest for a more muscular, intervention-happy US government was completely successful, and the world is much poorer for it.
  
  All that aside, this is a useful book. I've been hearing a lot about Raphael Lemkin recently. Lemkin was a Polish attorney who lost his family to the Holocaust, created the concept of genocide, and tirelessly lobbied the UN genocide convention into existence. His continued reputation probably owes a lot to this book. Power's documentation of the politics of a vanished age, the 1990s, is valuable. It reminds us that a saner, less violent US government is very possible. We had one in fact. If we weren't creating so many catastrophes, then we'd be better able, as a country and a world, to focus on genocides that are still cropping up in places like Myanmar, South Sudan, Tigray (possibly), and Xinjiang (if you really extend the definition).
  
  Power closes her chapter on the massacre at Srebrenica with a quote from Bob Dole. It's an odd choice, but I think it illustrates what this book, and the politics of genocide over the past few decades have really been about. "'Some may question... why we're involved in Bosnia in the first place,' Dole said. 'I think that's a very easy answer: because we happen to be the leader of the world." That's one of the many tragedies here. Policing genocide only became a big deal in the 1990s because it gave the US an excuse to exert power after the fall of the Cold War. This was a happy accident. US intervention in the Balkans was a good and overdue thing. But after 9/11 came along, we didn't need the excuse anymore. And we've caused so many larger catastrophes that if a Balkan scale genocide were happening today, we wouldn't even notice it.
• 
  Vheissu

  This book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a classic and deserves its reputation. If Power's tone is just a bit too self-righteous for my tastes, her outrage at the world's anemic responses to modern genocides, and particularly those of the United States, is fully warranted by her exhaustive and heart-rending research.
  
  Reading the book today, one necessarily muses about Power's own success in preventing contemporary genocides as U.S. ambassador to the UN, especially the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian and Syrian governments and their ISIS adversaries. While Ambassador Power has emphatically condemned the crimes committed in the Syrian civil war, her government did precious little to stop them, Obama's "red line" notwithstanding. Some have accused the Israelis of genocide by expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank (I am not one of those), but the accusation illustrates one of the problems in defeating this scourge: ambiguity of the term "genocide" itself. Acts of genocide need not reproduce the consequences of the Holocaust, but exactly what acts does it include? At what point do crimes like murder and rape cease being despicable felonies and become genocide? How are national leaders supposed to know?
  
  The ambiguities of the UN Genocide Convention (formally the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide) with regard to the legal elements of genocide and other matters are only some of the imponderables that the West generally, and the United States in particular, have used to justify inaction in deterring or stopping these acts. Indeed, Ms. Power reserves her most bitter criticisms for the U.S. government. The United States, she claims, "repeatedly allowed genocide" and "did almost nothing to deter the crime" (p. 504). "The real reason," she writes, that "the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide" was because American "leaders did not want to" (p. 508). The United States government was not heartless or itself genocidal, but rather was reluctant to expend the lives and treasure necessary to make a decisive difference, especially when there was little if any American public support for military action (p.509) and the facts on the ground were unclear. American leaders were cautious about even using the "g-word" for fears that it would galvanize public opinion into demanding rash military action, or that the government would be accused of exaggerating the problem in order to justify U.S. military imperialism.
  
  Ms. Power also claims that American officials were reluctant to label a situation genocide because they believed that a finding of genocide "carried with it a legal and moral ... imperative to act" (p. 508). Genocide anywhere creates a moral imperative for states to act, but the legal obligations imposed on states by the Genocide Convention are a different matter. The Convention requires state parties to enact domestic laws prohibiting genocide, and to prosecute or extradite those individuals charged with this crime; the Convention does not, however, require or even permit a state party to apply military force unilaterally in order to prevent genocide in another country, notwithstanding the title of the convention itself. Article VIII of the Convention provides:
  

  Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III.

  
  There simply is no international legal authority much less an obligation for states to prevent genocide committed by other states, even if perhaps there ought to be. The only political entity with the authority to interfere in the domestic affairs of another state, which is what the prevention of genocide amounts to, is the UN Security Council or, in some unique cases, the General Assembly. Any belief to the contrary by U.S. government attorneys simply demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of international law.
  
  It was relatively easy for Ms. Power to criticize the U.S. government as a reporter. Things must seem a little different when one occupies the U.S. seat in the United Nations. What has Ms. Power learned about the problem of genocide from her days as an ambassador? I, for one, anxiously await her next book about her own role as a high-ranking U.S. official in a world where genocide remains too common and America has continued its pathetic response to this ongoing problem.