Samantha Power and the Bush Doctrine

THE CONVERGENCE OF TWO UTOPIAN DREAMS

Samantha Power and the Liberal Humanitarian Interventionist's Contribution to the Bush Doctrine

February 4, 2009.

THE BUSH DOCTRINE BEGINS

After the hotly contested presidential election of 2000, George W. Bush rode into office promising the country a softer, more conservative touch with a focus on education, defense, and restoring honor to the White House¹.   The election that is today better remembered for its drawn out recount spent little time focusing on issues of foreign import, and so the first few months of the Bush administration went by with nary a mention of global affairs.

On September 11, 2001, the post-Cold War era of peace and economic stability ended when terrorists attacked New York and Washington, which handed the Bush administration’s neoconservatives an unprecedented opportunity to shape American foreign policy as it entered the twenty-first century.  What had been a piecemeal approach to flare-ups in the 1990s’ unipolar power vacuum was replaced by a vast and comprehensive grand strategy whose foundation was an ideology based on turn-of-the-century Wilsonianism and whose fine points were hammered out among insiders and opinion makers in the 1990s.  What is now known as the “Bush Doctrine” paired an eagerness to project American military might with a plan that called for spreading liberal market democracies in regions deemed to be at odds with American hegemony – in effect, militant Wilsonianism.  The aim: to create a world more compatible with the United States’ national interests by using imperialism to impose new forms of governance.  In this paper, I will define what an ideology is and how this doctrine fits into that paradigm.  I will also highlight the role progressive imperialism played in the ideology’s development and how it came to be part of the Bush Administration’s approach to the post 9/11 world.  Finally, I will examine the case of Samantha Power, a human rights activist from Harvard who has found herself an unwitting accomplice to the grand strategy of the Bush administration.

THE IDEOLOGY

The Bush Doctrine as laid out in the June 1, 2002 speech to the graduates of the Military Academy at West Point is based on an ideology that takes the Democratic Peace Theory as fact and assumes America’s judgment to be unimpaired and morally sound in all cases².

The doctrine itself is not a knee-jerk reaction to an attack, but instead a product of a unique series of events that started with the Cold War and continued through the Soviet Union’s disintegration to the onset of unchallenged American hegemony in the 1990s.  The doctrine’s underpinnings lie in an uncompromising belief in the primacy of liberal Western values, and their capacity to create an international environment in which a permanent peace is possible.  (Indeed, this is exactly the ideology that surfaced in Wilson’s Fourteen Points, according to John Ikenberry³).

The authors of this “Democratic Peace Theory”, sequestered in America’s ivory towers, saw a curious course of events play out as the Soviet Union collapsed and it and its former satellites democratized and liberalized.  Suddenly, in the 1990s, war among these nations seemed unthinkable, and eventually this ideology of democracy-fueled peace became the conventional wisdom, making its way into the mainstream of American political rhetoric.  In effect, the 1990s served as supporting evidence for the claim to moral superiority that the neoconservatives of the West laid on the world. With the former Soviet Union in shambles following a decades-long arms race, the United States found itself in a historically unprecedented position of power, where its only possible competitor had suddenly disintegrated due to a variety of factors.  The Cold War itself was simultaneously a war of ideas and of weapons, and so when it ended the United States was left with a surplus of nuclear warheads and a surplus of confidence in its system of governance. In A Pact with the Devil, Tony Smith explains how the end of the Cold War gave birth to an aggressive new ideology that used the spread of democracy across former communist states to justify further incursions into unfriendly regimes:

[L]iberals were persuaded that the United States had won the Cold War ... because of the style of its power....the collapse of Soviet communism was the end not simply of the Soviet state but of a model for political organization the world around.⁴

In the process, a new stage of Wilsonian thinking was born, one that was an ideology because it linked people with an understanding of history and moral purpose in order to forward a political program based on the triumph of the Cold War.  It was an ideology that blended fact-based realism with a faith in the absolute moral superiority of Western liberal democracies.

Aside from the near-religious faith in free trade and democratic liberalization, another main ideological tenet of the Bush Doctrine is the concept of “progressive imperialism,” which is a process of imposing desired societal outcomes onto rogue societies for national security purposes, or, in effect, conquer them to save them and us.  Accordingly, conquering nations is morally acceptable if it is in the United States’ best interest because, as the world’s hegemonic power, what is in the US’ best interest is in everyone’s best interest.  And at the center of this concept is the Democratic Peace Theory (DPT), which finds its origins in Emmanuel Kant’s 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace” and its development in the twentieth century political science circles where it was statistically tested.  The fact that Kant’s writings influenced both the birth of this theory and of the American independence movement is no coincidence; the idea and rhetoric of a perpetual peace is one that is easily sold to a patriotic American public.

John Rawls contributed the weightiest academic support for DPT in his 1999 book The Law of Peoples.  Rawls described the theory’s (and liberals’) goal: “a situation in which, over the course of time, citizens acquire a sense of justice that inclines them not only to accept but to act upon the principles of justice.”  He goes on to say “If the hypothesis [of DPT] is correct, armed conflict between democratic peoples will tend to disappear as they approach that ideal, and they will engage in war only as allies in self-defense against outlaw states.”⁵

The ideology that became the Bush Doctrine began to coalesce in the 1990s when a political philosophy began to unite those frustrated by aspects of both parties, from anti-Republican sentiment for Nixon’s China policy and Soviet Union overtures to anti-Democratic sentiment for the party’s unwillingness to pursue communism fully⁶.   Over two decades, these early neoconservatives took what they assumed to be a politically safe American ideal – democracy promotion – and stripped away the age-old assumption that democracy was incompatible with some cultures, replacing it instead with a post-Cold War belief that democracy can take root in whichever culture it is introduced.  Francis Fukuyama’s idea that “[r]egimes ... are not just formal institutions and authority structures; they shape and are shaped by the societies underlying them,”⁷  would no longer be applied.  The world should be molded into the way we, as the world’s moral authority, see it as it ought to be.

By the 1990s neoconservatives were shifting their focus away from the former Soviet Union and toward the “Broader Middle East,” the center of which was Iraq.  When President Bush declared that the post World War II model of democracy creation applied to Germany and Japan could and should be applied to other countries around the world, he cited the positive effects of the occupation and reconstruction of those two countries as proof positive that democracy was a universal human value:

Our nation's cause has always been larger than our nation's defense. We fight, as we always fight, for a just peace -- a peace that favors human liberty. We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent.

Bush went further, explaining the role that our moral superiority – that is, Western, liberal market democracies – had in defeating our enemies in the past.

[T]he war on terror will require ... firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.

America confronted imperial communism in many different ways -- diplomatic, economic, and military. Yet moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause....

Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.⁸

This statement reveals how the Bush Doctrine is grounded in an ideological belief in the superiority of liberal market democracies and their capacity to perfect the condition of human governance.  Much like the ideology of communism in the early twentieth century, this ideology had the complete package: it put forth a social narrative with historical background and events as supporting evidence, and united a group of people under the common ideological banner of liberal free market democracies.  With the Middle East finally commanding a central role in American foreign policy, this group of ideologues was able to use its position of power to guide the hand of the president’s foreign policy team as they prepared their response to the 9/11 attacks.  And toward the end of his West Point speech, Bush reveals the neo-Wilsonian underpinnings of his ideology, one that latches onto the promise of a universal peace through a combination of unchallenged American military strength, open markets, and liberal values:

As we defend the peace, we also have an historic opportunity to preserve the peace. We have our best chance since the rise of the nation state in the 17th century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of prepare for war....

Competition between great nations is inevitable, but armed conflict in our world is not. More and more, civilized nations find ourselves on the same side -- united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos. America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge thereby, making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace....

When it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. The requirements of freedom apply fully to Africa and Latin America and the entire Islamic world. The peoples of the Islamic nations want and deserve the same freedoms and opportunities as people in every nation. And their governments should listen to their hopes.⁹

Indeed, the president’s clear enunciation of his new doctrine was ideologically dependent on a belief system anchored in the righteousness of American might and liberal democratic governance.  The president went out of his way to explain that the world’s future is not a clash of civilizations but instead one of peace between nations united by their common liberalism – by which he meant, of course, that history is far from over.

The point of critical importance is how neoconservatives broke with the tradition of American foreign policy that saw democracy as incompatible with certain cultures for a worldview that assumed democracy could, would and should take root wherever its seeds were sown. These neoconservatives became convinced that this proposition would be vindicated in Iraq in part because of the influence of elite Iraqi exiles who argued that underneath the layers of Ba'athist suppression, Iraqi society was fertile territory for the growth of a democratic culture.  According to Noah Feldman of Harvard Law School, neoconservatives and exiles like Ahmad Chalabi found great company in each other, as their goals were mutually complimentary.¹⁰   The “Iraqi Liberation” angle fit nicely with the moral dimension the argument for intervention in Iraq took.  But also, the rise of comparative political studies and several exceptional examples of democracy flourishing (South Africa and South Korea being two cases) led many to change their view and believe that democracy was truly universal.

So pervasive was the belief that spreading democracy was morally correct that most of the post-invasion criticism was not in any way directed toward the decision to invade, but instead toward minutiae like troop levels and on-the-ground tactical maneuvering.  This is because the ideology was fixated on Iraq, the despotic state that had come to highlight for neoconservatives the lack of resolve exhibited by both post-Cold War presidents.  The decision of George H. W. Bush not to continue to Baghdad in his offensive against Saddam Hussein in Kuwait and southern Iraq and the abandonment of the subsequent Shia uprising represented the ultimate squandered opportunity for these neoconservatives, especially when followed by a decade of Democratic leadership whose focus on domestic issues wasted a moment in time when the United States could have imposed its will on the world with minimal effort.

In his article “The Democracy Crusade Myth,” Thomas Carothers examines ways in which the Bush Administration’s foreign policy has failed to be liberal in character before admitting that the dysfunctionality of Bush’s world approach may indeed harm democracy promotion, something to be promoted and funded.¹¹   But in doing so, Mr. Carothers betrays exactly how pervasive the ideology of the Doctrine itself is.  As detailed earlier in this essay, the concept of democracy promotion as a tool of foreign policy is part and parcel of the Bush Doctrine (to be specific, its ideological underpinning that says democracy will be readily accepted if only a few basic circumstances are in place¹²) and is a relatively new addition to the American political lexicon.  This particular element of the Bush Doctrine has been incorporated into academia’s conventional wisdom shockingly quickly due to the ease with which it fits into the post-9/11 mindset, where failed and autocratic states breed violent extremism that threatens our way of life.  Later in this paper, the crucial role that liberals played in the Bush Doctrine’s development will be more closely examined.

A specific series of events paved the way for the implementation of the Bush Doctrine. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the relative calm of the 1990s, the turn-of-the-century revision of sovereignty, and the 9/11 attacks created the circumstances which allowed the administration's neoconservative, militant Wilsonian ideologues to implement their radical agenda.  It is clear that the neoconservative, interventionist streak ran deep in the Bush administration before the attacks of 9/11, but only then was the opportunity to act finally afforded. And while nobody could truly predicted 9/11, the neoconservatives are one of the likeliest groups to flatter themselves by suggesting that they had the foresight to predict that relatively unaggressive foreign policy of the 1990s would come back to haunt us (though they predicted that the threat would come from Saddam Hussein’s rogue regime).

In summary, the Bush Doctrine is an ideology because it unites what had been a potent academic movement around an unprecedented national security situation that permits an expansion of American imperial might in a way that would not have been tolerated otherwise.

SAMANTHA POWER’S CONTRIBUTIONS

Samantha Power, founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, has emerged as one of the decade’s most influential commentators on U.S. foreign policy due to her vigorous advocacy for military intervention in humanitarian crises.  The implementation of the ideology of the Bush Doctrine after 9/11 increasingly pushed Ms. Power, her center, and her colleagues toward the mainstream of political thought.  Since 2001, Power’s and the Carr Center’s advocacy has provided some of the most important academic and moral underpinning for the American invasion of Iraq, which she opposed.

Ms. Power graduated from Yale University in 1992 and in 1993 moved to the Balkans to cover the breakup of Yugoslavia, where she wrote about the related conflicts for several years.  In 1996, she became an analyst for the International Crisis Group and helped launch the organization in Bosnia.  While in the Balkans, Ms. Power’s impressions of the limits of American and European resolve were cemented, and when she returned to attend Harvard Law School in 1998 (with the idea of becoming a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court), she began researching what eventually became A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.  The 2002 book, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, meticulously documents America’s role in the process of warning, recognition, response, and aftermath in each genocidal conflict of the twentieth century from the Armenian genocide in the 1910s to the Balkan Conflicts in the 1990s. In the book, Power describes how the few humanitarian efforts the United States made over the course of the twentieth century ended up making a large difference in massacres, pointing, for example, to the George H. W. Bush administration rhetoric during Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds in Northern Iraq, and the NATO bombing of Kosovo under President Clinton. The conclusion that Ms. Power reaches in the book is that the United States and its overwhelming military and diplomatic influence could have and should have done more to prevent genocide in every case.  The book found a place on the New York Times Bestseller List, and as a result of Power’s increased prominence, she has found consistent platforms for her activism.  Over the past several years, Power has written extensively for TIME, The New Republic, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and other publications¹³.   Since 2002, A Problem from Hell has become something of the human rights activist’s bible, providing hefty research to support the humanitarian claim that genocide and human rights abuses can, in fact, be successfully stymied with the proper leadership.

In her various other essays and articles, Power presents ideas about how to best utilize the domestic bureaucracy in the United States and the international framework of the United Nation in order to create a “genocide constituency,” or an interest group of people whose voting issues would include a politician’s stance on genocide.  Having reached the conclusion that the American government will not act unless prodded by self-interest or voters, Power helped to popularize many of the ways in which genocide activists are advocating for their desired policies today.

And it’s not just the power of Power’s ideas that have fueled her popularity.  Her Pulitzer Prize win and her frequent, consistent writing have generated considerable buzz in the press.  In addition, Power’s celebrity friends in the human rights movement have helped to keep the spotlight on her advocacy. Her rise, cemented by her 2009 appointment to the National Security Council by President Obama¹⁴, has created an interest rarely generated by Harvard academics.¹⁵
When Ms. Power is not being profiled by magazines, she is busy putting forth the message that if only the United States were more proactive in stamping out moral abuses such as genocide, its security would be enhanced.  (This message, detailed later in this paper, is not one whose primary purpose is to strengthen the United States solely for the sake of US national security– that is a side effect of the main goal, which is human rights promotion and genocide prevention.  Only after the United Nations demonstrated in the 1990s its inability to enforce human rights did Power and other liberals turn to the United States. ¹⁶ )

Like several other up-and-coming policymakers, Ms. Power’s experiences were forged in the post-Cold War crucible of the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s.  There, she and many of her current colleagues saw in the new unipolar era hauntingly familiar images of concentration camps in Europe.  To them, this represented the total loss of confidence and moral authority that the United States had following the end of the Second World War, and the end of the Cold War.  The US’ solemn promise of “never again” and the moral authority it supposedly derived from that had vanished.

Power wrote A Problem from Hell before the paradigm shift of September 11, 2001, and as such the book should be viewed as a culmination of the momentous shifts that the human rights community underwent in the 1990s.  However, after 9/11 rocked American foreign policy and decisively pushed an isolationist George W. Bush into foreign affairs (and into the arms of his neoconservative advisors), the book and its policy recommendations took on increased weight as more and more policymakers connected human rights abuses to the sort of violence that visited New York and Washington.  (It’s important to note that Power’s book was published right after 9/11, and she did include an understandably shortsighted reflection on what effects the events might have on global politics.)

It is in this context that Power and co-director Michael Ignatieff have worked to create in the Carr Center for Human Right Policy a place for like-minded human rights activists to come together to formulate policy and devise plans for better implementing their goals.

In advocating for a more effective human rights policy, Power has attempted to connect activists to policymakers in meaningful ways. In 2002 Samantha Power stated that in order for the human rights movement to be successful in preventing genocide and stopping atrocities, “we've got to build a way of connecting grassroots to grass tops, to elite centers of power.”¹⁷  In 2005, Ms. Power got just such an opportunity when she moved to Washington with the support of the Council on Foreign Relations to work in the office of an up-and-coming Senator from Illinois and fellow Harvard Law School graduate, Barack Obama.  At that time, Obama was not as well known as Ms. Power, and her arrival brought attention to Mr. Obama.¹⁸   In her role as an advisor first to the junior senator, then the presidential candidate, and now the President, Ms. Power has indeed succeeded in connecting the grassroots to the grass tops.

In Obama, Power seems to have found willing partner in her policy ambitions.  In an interview with Rolling Stone, Power described Obama as a “sponge” and explained that he “doesn’t get weighted down by the limits of American power, but he sees you have to grasp those limits in order to transcend them,” which is precisely the same argument that Ms. Power makes time and time again in her book.  The same article described how both Obama and Power are part of the same generation whose impressions of American power were more influenced by the 1990s human rights conflicts than the Cold War.  The article went on:

According to Susan Rice, a Brookings Institution scholar who serves as an informal advisor to Obama, their ideas come from the “profound conviction that we are interconnected” and that “we ignore [failed states]...at our own peril.”¹⁹

In David Rieff’s opinion, the reason why the people whose worldviews were molded by the Balkans fiascos of the 1990s are so much more devoted to the concept of humanitarian intervention is because those conflicts were in Europe, where the promise of “never again” had first been made and where the fatal consequences of our own equivocations were so stark once again.  The emotional effect of images of concentration camps in Europe—this time live and in color on CNN—was much stronger because of the profound legacy the Holocaust has on the psyche of the West.²⁰

However, Ms. Power is not in the same camp as all liberal interventionists.  Susan Rice (now President Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations) and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, two other influential advocates for humanitarian intervention, do so with the desire first to protect the interests of the United States.  Their belief in intervention stems from their belief that a utopian, Kantian world peace in which states do not go to war with each other because the status quo, defined by stable, liberal democracies, is preferable to fighting with other liberal democracies.²¹   Academics such as these two contributed mightily to the “Pillar of Purpose” aspect of the Bush Doctrine that Tony Smith documents in his book A Pact with the Devil.

Whereas neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Robert Kagan have long rejected the United Nations because it impedes United States unilateral action on matters of national interest, by the late 1990s multilateralism-inclined liberal humanitarian interventionists also began to see the United Nations as an impediment because of its lackluster enforcement of human rights.  By working around the UN, liberals hoped to create a utopian, Kantian world in which peace was maintained by the US military, human suffering was alleviated, and only moral imperatives drove military action.  Convincing the US to take on the role that the UN never would require creating the context that would permit it to intervene in humanitarian crises.

Activists and academics such as Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Michael Ignatieff and others contributed to this context, which suddenly converged with deep-rooted neoconservative dreams of a remade “Broader Middle East” in the post-9/11 world.  In a way, they made a “Pact with the Devil,” to quote Tony Smith, because they created a militarized humanitarianism which was used to bolster the moral underpinnings—which were, by design, highly compatible with the nationalist narrative in the United States—that would permit America to undertake wars of altruism on behalf of oppressed people.  Their contributions enabled neoconservatives to create a new narrative in which the US’ national interests were the interests of freedom and democracy around the world. Indeed, David Rieff summed up the bargain when he called Power and her advocacy for militarized humanitarianism “emblematic of the historic compromise between the human rights movement and the American Empire...”²²  The failures of humanitarian actions in the 1990s were what militarized it and connected it to the neoconservative movement.

This liberal drive toward militarization stemmed from the fact that the 1990s looked very different to neoconservatives than they did to humanitarian interventionists.  To neoconservatives, the 1990s was a decade in which Western (American) values like freedom and the rule of liberal market democracy spread quickly across the globe.  Even undemocratic and illiberal states began imitating Western values and rhetoric, so powerful had they become.  But to neoconservatives, the 1990s was also a lost decade in that the United States did not aggressively pursue the expansion of its own domination of the world, from securing oil interests in the “Broader Middle East” to downgrading the influence of the United Nations, and more.²³

To liberals and those who eventually became humanitarian interventionists, the 1990s was a decade of deep distress, with famines, wars, and even genocides sweeping the globe unchecked.  David Rieff explains in his book At the Point of a Gun exactly how the Balkans conflicts—which ended up influencing this group decisively—changed their perceptions of the world.

Given the paralysis of European powers, and the fecklessness of the UN, and the fact that, month after month and year after year, the slaughter in the Balkans went on, it was hardly surprising that activists in America came to feel, quite simply, that if the US military was capable of stopping such a horror, then it should; full stop.²⁴

The influence of the Balkans conflicts continues to play a major role in the way Ms. Power and several of her contemporaries approach humanitarian intervention.  It was precisely this failure of action in an era of great international promise that so discouraged her and other liberals.  In fact, David Rieff himself—today a major critic of the humanitarian movement and Power’s approach particularly—first counted himself in her camp, and he wrote an article in 1999 on the heels of the Kosovo intervention in which he advocated for precisely the sort of decisive, unilateral action that Power wrote for in A Problem from Hell.  He eventually changed his stance, citing the danger of consistency inherent in his previous position.²⁵   (Consistency was precisely what Power advocated for most vigorously.)  Indeed, the Balkans represented the “high water mark” of the catastrophe in the liberal interventionism’s timeline, and pushed liberal groups to convene to author the 2001 document called “The Responsibility to Protect,” which was adopted as policy by the United Nations World Summit in 2005.

REVISION OF SOVEREIGNTY

In the 1990s, as neoconservatives were beginning to fret about an impotent America, liberals were glowing about, in the words of former UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, an “irresistible shift in public attitudes toward the belief that the defense of the oppressed in the name of morality should prevail over frontiers and legal documents.”²⁶

Due to the crises of the 1990s described in the previous paragraphs, liberals got down to fixing the impediments to humanitarian intervention in 2001 when they, with the sponsorship of the United Nations and the Canadian government, sat down to qualify the internationally-recognized definition of sovereignty.  The product of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) was the document “The Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), which was published in Summer 2001.  On page 31 of “The Responsibility to Protect,” it stated that the newly qualified definition of sovereignty meant that “in extreme and exceptional cases, the responsibility to react may involve the need to resort to military action.” State legitimacy was now to be derived from its ability and willingness to protect its own people.²⁷

David Rieff contends that American liberal scholars contributed much to the development of the Bush Doctrine, with their contention that “bring in the rule of law, they argue, and you are bound to get closer—no matter how far there remains to go—to a world in which, as the American legal scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter puts it, there may finally be ‘order and peace in human relations.’”²⁸   This revision of the definition of state sovereignty, a response to crisis that attempted to create the legal framework for a perpetual peace, was the major liberal contribution to the Bush Doctrine.

OPPOSITION TO THE WAR IN IRAQ

Michael Ignatieff, Samantha Power’s former co-director at the Carr Center, has written extensively on topics similar to the ones Ms. Power has.  However, the two colleagues split on the decision to support the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and their positions on this issue are revealing because they show how the intersection of the neoconservative and liberal interventionist ideology caused a rift to grow among liberals the early 2000s.

Just before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Samantha Power wrote an article entitled “Force Full” in The New Republic in which she laid out her delicate argument for why she opposed the war.  In it, Power criticized the United States for a piecemeal approach to human rights policy and connected her opposition to the way in which the United States pursued the run-up to the invasion, but not the actual action itself.  She ended her piece scoldingly by explaining that if only the United States had worked through international institutions and demonstrated humility, it could have legitimized its goals.²⁹

It is worth noting that Power’s opposition did not stem from a stated belief that the invasion would harm Iraqis or set off a domino effect of disturbances in the Middle East.  She only floated those two ideas after it became clear that regime change was backfiring.  Instead, she reflected broadly on failures of multilateralism and consistency in the 1990s, which gives the reader the impression that she was offended that the rhetoric of her life mission was being commandeered by the cowboy president from Texas, who suddenly, and—more importantly to Power, unconvincingly—found the human rights gospel.  Without being explicit, Power implied that the invasion of Iraq would cheapen the human rights movement, and that was the reason she opposed it.  (Imagining that instead of President Bush, a Democratic Vice President Joseph Lieberman had pushed for an invasion, one could be led to believe that Power might have instead supported the invasion.)

Aside from grudgingly stating her opposition to the war, the article reveals several peculiar ways in which Power actually fell in line with the neoconservative backers of the war.  Power stated that the 1990s was a “lost decade,” the same terminology that neoconservatives used to indict the Clinton administration for its unwillingness to further American interests.  Of course, thinkers like Power and Kagan thought the 1990s “lost” for very different reasons, but strangely those “different” reasons led the two academics back again to the same point: a claim, both implied and outright stated, to have seen an event like 9/11 on the horizon.  Power explained in A Problem from Hell that the US ignored humanitarian conflicts at its peril, and Kagan explained that the US used the “peace dividend” at its peril.³⁰   By 2005, it went so far that Power—spearhead of the liberal humanitarian interventionist camp—and President Bush—leader of the neoconservative camp—were saying essentially the same thing:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.³¹

Compare that statement (and substitute “security” and “stability” with “liberty”) with one Power made in A Problem from Hell:

Security for Americans at home and abroad is contingent on international stability, and there is perhaps no greater source of havoc than a group of well-armed extremists bent on wiping out a people on ethnic, national, or religious grounds.³²

Indeed, much of what Ms. Power’s earlier writings, speeches, and interviews revealed leads one to believe that she would have decisively supported the decision to invade Iraq.  In an interview at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002, months before the invasion and when Power was just emerging on the national scene, she was freer in letting her views flow, saying:

Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism.  But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced...We haven’t seen an American leader, yet, anyway, who has the vision and the courage, the fortitude, to take the American people into a situation like this, to make the case that it’s a long-term security threat, to make the case that reality isn’t a dirty word in foreign policy.³³

However, in A Problem from Hell, it is also possible to guess that Power might have opposed such a war because of the stark hypocrisy of its justification.  In her writings before the book’s publication and in those from the interim period between its publication and the invasion of Iraq, she is extremely consistent about the need to be extremely consistent, and puts great store in rhetoric and impressions.  America’s power, she contends, is a moral one, and so our security is undermined when we seem hypocritical.  But at the same time, Power has engaged extensively with the same kind of trumped-up rhetoric, refusing to shirk from calling regimes evil.³⁴

Indeed, the tone of her New Republic article makes clear her dissatisfaction that the rhetoric of her movement was used as justification for the Bush administration’s Iraq invasion.  David Rieff explains how she was duped in At The Point of a Gun: “Human rights has become, however inconsistently applied, the official ideology of the American empire—something conservatives have understood, even if most activists have not.”³⁵

But Power not only contributed to the doctrine’s success by creating a well researched, morally-based argument for military action against rogue regimes, but also because she failed in several instances to propose alternate ways to carry out the justice she advocated for.  For instance, in A Problem from Hell, Power describes the possible recourses to justice for Saddam Hussein’s genocidal acts and suggests a trial in the International Criminal Court at The Hague or—cryptically—in Iraq.  However, she fails to propose a way in which Saddam would ever actually make it to a courtroom, since at that time the book was written Ba’ath regime was still very much in power and 9/11 had yet to occur.  When she reminds the reader that international justice as such “had not been levied since Nuremberg,” Power leads the reader to understand that in order to try Saddam Hussein, Iraq would first have to be conquered like Germany was in 1945.  She ends the Iraq section of her book on a somber and suggestive note, saying, “to this day...no Iraqi soldier or political leader has been punished.”  With knowledge of the ensuing fiasco in Iraq, that passage carries an air of painful irony today.³⁶

THE IGNATIEFF-POWER DIVIDE

Michael Ignatieff, Power’s colleague at the Carr Center, came out in support of the war in a series of articles published in the New York Times and New York Times Magazine in 2003.  His hopes for the invasion were decidedly idealistic, despite his frequent reminders that ideology would muddle the decision of whether or not to invade.  In the very first paragraphs of his article “I Am Iraq,” Ignatieff asks a question that betrays his blinding ideology: “Who seriously believes that 25 million Iraqis would not be better off if Saddam were overthrown?” Then, in the next breath, Ignatieff intones knowingly that, “ideology cannot help us here.”³⁷   The first assumption, commonplace at the time, is in fact very firmly rooted in the ideology associated with not only Democratic Peace Theory but also the belief in the universal appeal of Western values and human rights.  Liberals like Michael Ignatieff could not and would not imagine that life for Iraqis could possibly be worse under the enlightened stewardship of a liberal, Western democracy than under the decidedly brutal Saddam Hussein.  Ideology did not guide Ignatieff to this conclusion; it led him there like a priest leads his flock to the altar.

Ignatieff went even further down the neoconservative path in his next article “The American Empire” in which extolled the virtues of an American “Empire Lite”, insisting that only America “fills the hearts and minds of an entire planet with its dreams and desires."³⁸   No place for ideology, to be sure.

Based on the flowery things Michael Ignatieff said in the war’s run-up, it is not a stretch to imagine that the administration officials who predicted that America would be greeted as liberators might have invited Mr. Ignatieff to one of the administration’s “mission accomplished” photo opportunities.

But Ignatieff was clearly receiving the same sort of misinformation that members of the Bush administration were receiving from Iraqi exiles and other interested parties who played a major role in pushing the war.³⁹  He cited specifically the assurances he received that Iraqis would, even if they were harmed at the onset, benefit from the removal of Saddam.  Mr. Ignatieff also takes care to address some of the same objections that Samantha Power raised in her article against the war, saying “multilateral solutions to the world’s problems are all very well, but they have no teeth unless America bears its fangs.”  He twisted the dagger a little more, addressing the destructive possibilities of a WMD-armed Iraq (echoing administration talking points) and noted that other solutions had not worked, leaving America with “a reluctant last resort...regime change.”

Ignatieff and his belief that Iraq had the distinct potential for a democratic future if only the United States would decapitate the regime of Saddam Hussein meant that he had been influenced by the same influential Iraqi exiles from Kensington that that had found receptive company among the Bush Administration’s neoconservatives.  And even as the Bush administration was taking care to frame the invasion with the threat of a “mushroom cloud,” Ignatieff was boldly proclaiming that “if America takes on Iraq, it takes on the reordering of the whole region.”  He was not nearly as subtle as the President.

Ignatieff continues through the many justifications used in the days before the invasion, but ultimately disagrees with Ms. Power on her most critical point, saying, “the fact that states are both late and hypocritical in their adoption of human rights does not deprive them of the right to use force to defend them.”  Since Ignatieff sat on the ICISS and helped to redefine state sovereignty with the R2P doctrine, it is no surprise that he believed the right to intervene did not expire.  Later in his article, he delineates what should happen upon the removal of Hussein, and the list is essentially an outline of the very recommendations in the final “Responsibility to Protect” document published in 2001.⁴⁰

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

Humanitarian aid became a political tool in the 1990s because of a religious determination among liberals to find a way to implement humanitarian assistance and reduce human suffering.  The seemingly incomprehensible violence of the decade coupled with the failures of the United Nations and other self-professed nonaligned organizations pushed liberals to address the root causes of human suffering.  The solution, which according to David Rieff compromised the powerful neutrality of humanitarian organizations, was to politicize aid in order to address the root causes of conflict, or stop helping “the bad guys.”  Aid organizations now took on the task of judging who deserved to be helped.⁴¹

Power, perhaps more prominently than any other thinker, demonstrates that drive to create circumstances in which the human rights regimes are imposed.  In A Problem from Hell, she is clear about the need to connect those who understand the moral travesty that genocide makes of powerful states.  She also explains that human rights based foreign policy would help the United States in the long term, but it seems clear that her true motivation is not for a desire to protect America’s role as the world’s “hyperpower” for America’s sake.  Rather, she sees America’s role as a means to justify the end.  On the other hand, neoconservatives like Robert Kagan see the protection of America’s hegemonic position in the world as something to further for America’s sake, something done to maintain the status quo.  (Kagan would say that the side effect would probably be greater world stability, but that’s not his main goal.)

The two agree that the protection of human rights helps American interests, but they arrive at the conclusion for entirely different reasons.  Such a cleavage demonstrates how liberal interventionists and neoconservatives converged.  The humanitarian interventionist movement split down the middle when the neoconservative commandeered its arguments to frame an intellectually dishonest war.  Half of the camp decided to ignore the intellectual dishonesty in the hope that it would improve the lives of the Iraqi people, and the others suspiciously and woundedly watched on as human rights promotion took on even more baggage.

CONCLUSION

Since becoming a policy advisor to then-President-Elect Barack Obama, Power has refocused her writings from a single message of promoting human rights by any means necessary to a broader, more moderate stance that encompasses domestic concerns as well.  In her essay “Legitimacy and Competence,” published in July 2008 in To Lead the World⁴², Power writes what appears to be her new political manifesto, and in it she treads much more lightly than her freewheeling style of previous years.  Since at the time of its writing Power was an advisor to the presidential candidate, it makes sense that she chose to reign in her ideas.  But was it too late?

Despite Samantha Power’s attempts to tone down her rhetoric, the emerging power network in the West demonstrates that her ideological approach to world affairs—seen through the lens of the Balkans fiasco—is in fact becoming more and more common.  From Michael Ignatieff in Ottawa, Susan Rice at the United Nations, David Cameron in London, Nicolas Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner in Paris, and, most importantly, Barack Obama in Washington, the ideology of humanitarian interventionism, with its close links to neoconservatism, is really only now coming into power.

In January 2009, President Obama named Samantha Power a member of the National Security Council, ending a short period of token exile prompted by comments Power made about then-candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton⁴³ In the Obama Administration, along with U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice (another vocal supporter of humanitarian intervention) Power will likely influence American foreign policy for at least the next four years.  One can only imagine that the age of progressive, altruistic imperialism is, once again, only just beginning...