Boot, Pollak, and Power

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Noah Pollak and Max Boot have been batting the Samantha Power tennis ball back and forth across the net, and I find I agree with whoever hit last. But the debate has been slightly misconceived, or, at least, defined too narrowly. The Power problem is not just about her, or even about the difficulties Harvard professors face when they have to articulate their sometimes ill-formed ideas in public. It is symptomatic of the dilemma of a certain part of the left--and more than the left.

As Max has rightly put it, her book A Problem From Hell could have been written by a neocon, in that it emphasizes America's moral duty to intervene in cases of widespread abuses of human rights, and in particular to stop genocide. But the underlying assumption of much of her early work was that intervening was going to be easy. It was not going to get many, if any, U.S. troops killed; it was not going to involve them killing many bad guys; it was not going to cost a lot of money; and international institutions like the UN would do their job if only the U.S. gave a lead.

Her superb, career-making article in the Atlantic in September 2001 on "Bystanders to Genocide," was subtitled "Why the United States Let the Rwanda Tragedy Happen," implying that the basic problem was not that the U.S. could do nothing, but that it did do nothing. In Spring 2002, in Dissent, she examined "Raising the Cost of Genocide," making the explicit claim that the problem was lack of political will to intervene, and that ways should be found to raise the political cost to leaders who refuse to do so.

Of course, a lot of people on the Right--who should have known better--argued the same thing: if only we make up our minds to do the right thing, it is going to be easy. Iraq proved this was entirely wrong: U.S. troops killed and got killed, it cost a lot of money, and far from taking a cue from U.S. leadership, a lot of states-including three members of the UN Security Council-went out of their way to obstruct and paralyze its mechanisms.

And when the political costs were raised in real life, Power's response was to argue that we should fold. The dilemma is that there is no easy way to reconcile genuine opposition to genocide, a sincere belief the U.S. should do something to stop it, and being unwilling to take the heat that doing something involves. Power was not the only one who had to confront this problem of conflicting principles, which a psychologist might describe as one of cognitive dissonance. All of the human-rights hawks on the Left, like Peter Beinart, had to do so.

And most of these hawks--with honorable exceptions like Oliver Kamm--have ended up in the same place. If you are not willing to fight, but you still believe that you have to act, the logical solution is to argue that George W. Bush is the problem and that what you need to do is talk to the enemy. Indeed, this is the only logical alternative. You are still obeying the moral imperative to act, but you do not have to risk paying any costs for acting. Only Israel, which is friendly and democratic, and which is therefore most unlikely to retaliate, can be pushed around with safety: the evil regimes of the world are too dangerous to treat this way. Thus, insensibly, the Left has moved towards supporting any foe and opposing any friend to ensure the survival of liberty.

It is easy, but wrong, to put this all in a nasty way. I disagree completely with the solution that Power, Beinart, and the others have arrived at, but as Max implies, neocons must also confront the dilemma of conflicting beliefs. Like Power, neocons assumed that the issue was our lack of will, and the malignity of leaders like Saddam Hussein: if we summed the courage to knock him off, the problem would be solved.

Saddam was indeed malignant, and our will is indeed being tested. Quitting is no solution at all. But the problems in Iraq went deeper than Saddam: he made them a lot worse, but he did not create the social fissures he exploited so ruthlessly. The real weakness of Power's response is not simply that it relies entirely on diplomacy, but that it remains entirely top-down. Political leaders matters, but they are not the only thing that does. Unless conservatives acknowledge this, they will not do much better than liberals in responding to the dilemma that has ultimately made Power sound incoherent, and which in turn has given both Max and Noah so much material to work with.