The U.S. Reluctance to Defend During War
During Hitler’s tyranny, 78 speeches were made in the House of Representatives about the persecution of the Jews in Europe. Despite these speeches and resolutions, the killings went on.
The first time the United States or its European allies had intervened to head off a potential genocide was in Kosovo. However, during this Genocide, the White House thought that NATO actions might “reignite the war” and jeopardize the “safe areas.”
Never mind how one “reignites a war” but, as political commentator George Will said, “This fatuity calls to mind the 1944 letter in which the U.S. assistant secretary of war, John J. McCloy, said that one reason for not bombing Auschwitz and railroad lines leading to it was because doing so “might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.” The United States and its allies defended their restraint on the grounds that speaking out or applying soft sanctions to such a reclusive regime would be futile.
In WWII, the united states gave up the policy of keeping itself “free from European complications” and plunged into war. There was no danger to the country and no possible gain for the people but only power and wealth to be acquired.
In 1994, Rwanda, a country of 8 million, experienced the equivalent of two 9/11 attacks every day for 100 days. On an American scale, this would mean 23 million American deaths in 3 months. The very next day, when the United States turned for help around the world, Americans were gratified by the overwhelming response. However, when the Tutsi cried out to every country in the world, we turned away.war, 58% said no.
In 1915, with primitive communications, the New York Times published 145 stories about the Armenians Genocide. Nearly 80 years later, the same paper three days after the Rwanda genocide began, reported that “tens of thousands” of Rwandans had been murdered. It also devoted more space to the Bosnia Genocide than it did to any other single foreign story. Meaning, the U.S. officials who “didn’t know” or “did not fully appreciate” actually knew. They didn’t act not because they didn’t know, but because they didn’t want to.
After genocide has been proven over and over again, senior politicians slyly claimed that they didn’t know. Or, as President Clinton did in his 1998 Rwanda apology, that they “didn’t fully appreciate.” However, U.S. officials knew a remarkable amount. From Henry Morgenthau Sr., the well-connected U.S. ambassador in Constantinople in 1915, to Jon Western, the junior intelligence analyst on Bosnia in 1993, U.S. officials have pumped a steady stream of information up the chain to senior decision-makers-both early warnings ahead of genocide and vivid documentation during. The best intelligence even appeared in the morning papers.
States that don’t act propose the futility, perversity, and jeopardy of proposed measures. In addition, they often presented the choice as one between doing nothing and sending in hundreds of thousands of marines. For example, U.S. leaders, during the Rwanda Genocide, posed the choice as between staying out “getting involved everywhere.”
In Cambodia, those who were subjected to the daily horrors of the Khmer Rouge persisted in hoping that those who were hauled away were only being re-educated.
In Bosnia, two years into the war, when more than 100,000 deaths and the bloodiest of displacements had taken place, thousands of Muslims and Croats stubbornly refused to leave Serb-held territory. NATO enjoyed 35-to-1 superiority in military manpower in Bosnia, yet it did nothing.
Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and Harvard professor, explains:
Six months before Pearl Harbor, 76% of Americans polled favored supplying aid to Britain, but 79% opposed actually entering World War II. Once the United States was involved…support soared.
Two months before the invasion of Panama in 1989,…26% of Americans supported committing troops to overthrow military strongman Manuel Noriega, but once it came, 80% backed the decision to invade.
A week after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, before President Bush…mobilized support for U.S. combat, a majority of Americans opposed invading Iraq or even staging air strikes against Iraqi military bases. Four out of ten went so far as to say that the United States “should not get involved in a land war in the Middle East even if Iraq’s invasion means that Iraq permanently controls Kuwait.” Even after the president had deployed troops to the Gulf and demonized Hussein as “Hitler”, Americans preferred to stick with economic and diplomatic sanctions. Asked directly in November 1990 if the United States should go to
As Joe Biden said when he was Senator, “Collective security means arranging to blame one another for inaction so that everyone has an excuse. It does not mean standing together; it means hiding together.” American presidents have been accomplices to genocide many times.
What is most shocking about America’s reaction to Turkey’s killing of Armenians, the Holocaust, Pol Pot’s reign of terror, Iraq’s slaughter of the Kurds, Bosnian Serbs’ mass murder of Muslims, and the Hutu elimination of Tutsi isn’t that the U.S. refused to deploy ground forces to combat the atrocities — for much of the century, even the most ardent interventionists didn’t lobby for U.S. ground invasions.
What is most shocking is that U.S. policymakers did almost nothing to deter the crime. Because America’s “vital national interests” were not considered imperiled by mere genocide, senior U.S. officials didn’t give genocide the moral attention it warranted. Indeed, on occasion the United States directly or indirectly aided those committing genocide. It orchestrated the vote in the UN Credentials Committee to favor the Khmer Rouge. It sided with and supplied U.S. agricultural and manufacturing credits to Iraq while Saddam Hussein was attempting to wipe out the country’s Kurds.
Because it happened a long time ago, we forgot we said “Never again” to the Holocaust.
The Genocide Convention
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a nonbinding, 30-article declaration of aspirational principles — civil, political, economic, and social justice. The genocide convention, on the other hand, requires states to behave a certain way.
It took the United States 38 years to ratify the Genocide Convention. Some senators thought that its ratification would give United States critics license to investigate the eradication of Native Americans. Others, like southern senators, feared that lawyers might argue that the segregation in the South inflicted “mental harm” and thus counted as genocide. William Proxmire, the Wisconsin senator, spent 19 years fighting for the genocide convention.
Proxmire delivered 3,211 speeches to get the U.S. to ratify the Genocide Convention. Finally, in 1988, the Senate overwhelmingly adopted the Convention with 83 in favor, 11 against, and six abstaining. Ninety-seven nations ratified the convention before the United States did.
Full ratification required the passage of “Implementing legislation.” This would make genocide a crime under U.S. federal law. However, it wasn’t until October 1988 that the Senate got around to passing the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, which was named the “Proxmire Act.” The U.S. law finally made genocide punishable in the United States by life imprisonment and fines of up to $1 million.
During those 38 years, the Senate endorsed hundreds of other useless treaties. Proxmire lists them out,
[A] Tuna Convention with Costa Rica, a bridge across the Rainy River, a Halibut Convention with Canada, a Road Traffic Convention allowing licensed American drivers to drive on European highways, a Shrimp Convention with Cuba…a treaty of amity with Muscat and Oman, and even a most colorful and appetizing treaty entitled the “Pink Salmon Protocol.”
In 1911, the United States signed a convention with Great Britain, Russia, and Japan to preserve and protect fur seals in the North Pacific Ocean. However, the Senate didn’t criminalize genocide.
Even after ratifying the Genocide Convention, it was so laden with caveats that it carried next to no force. On top of that, it would take another 10 years before the international community would convict anyone for genocide.
If the genocide convention stood any chance of resembling law, countries had to give the International Court of Justice (ICJ) advance consent. This way, judges would apply the genocide convention independently, without requesting a state’s permission each time.
The United States decided not to give consent. Thus, before the U.S. could be called as a party to any case before the ICJ, the U.S. president would have to give consent to the court’s jurisdiction. In other words, the United States would decide whether it would be tried before the World Court. It was the equivalent of an accused murderer choosing to give consent or not before he could be tried.
The legal consequence of this reservation was that if the United States suspected that other countries were committing genocide and attempted to bring them before the ICJ, the accused countries could assert the American reservation against the United States under something called the doctrine of reciprocity. The United States was thus blocked from ever filing genocide charges in the court against perpetrator states.
Was Hitler allowed to decide which cases go before the World Court? No. So, why should the United States be allowed to decide? Under this reservation, people like Pol Pot and the Idi Amin could escape legal action by invoking the U.S. reservation. In other words, if the U.S. gets to decide which cases go before the Court, so does every other nation. The United States was embracing a position that’s only been adopted by countries that may have reasons to fear charges of genocide.
In 1989, nine European countries (Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) filed formal objections to several of the conditions the United States included in its ratification resolution.
Internal efforts to promote a new international treaty banning chemical weapons production, use and transfer was also met with stiff resistance from the Washington national security community and from allies like West Germany, which were profiting handsomely from the sale of chemical agents.
When the president and the Senate got their first chance to enforce the law against the genocidal regime of Saddam Hussein, strategic and domestic political concerns caused them to side with Saddam instead. The United States fought over the word “genocide” for months.
When the Khmer Rouge and the Bosnian Serbs began eradicating minority groups, those who opposed a U.S. response ignored the genocide convention’s terms and denied genocide was underway, claiming the number of dead or the percentage of the group eliminated was too small.
The reason the word “political” is excised from the Convention was that Stalin demanded it. He knew that if destroying a “political group” was genocidal, his bloody purges and mass imprisonment of political opponents would fit the bill. Stalin had enough support from other leaders who also wanted to reserve the right to wipe out their political opponents that the word was dropped.
New War
To your success,
Nikhil Mahadea
