[Jeremy Kuzmarov is an assistant professor of history at the University of Tulsa and author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs. He is currently working on a book on American international police training programs and the link to major human rights violations.]

In 2003, Samantha Power who now serves as an advisor to the Obama administration won the Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide which lamented the reluctance of successive US administrations to intervene militarily to halt unfolding genocides. Her book inspired the Save Darfur movement which called on the US government to halt genocide from taking place-- by military intervention if necessary. Paradoxically, activists within the movement and Power herself raised little moral outcry about the humanitarian catastrophes bred by US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, nor about the global torture gulag that Washington had established under the guise of the so-called War on Terror, except to lament how it had damaged America’s international credibility. Power’s choice of genocides which Washington allegedly could have prevented was also selective, and included cases where the term was inappropriate. It avoided cases, furthermore, where the United States directly supported mass atrocities or genocide (as in Indonesia in 1965 and Guatemala in the early 1980s) and where US actions can be considered genocidal, or at least quasi-genocidal (Vietnam 1955-1975, Laos 1965-1973 and Cambodia 1970-1975, Iraq in the 1990s under the sanctions regime, and under US occupation).

In their important new book The Politics of Genocide, Edward S. Herman, professor emeritus at the Wharton school of business, and David Peterson, an independent scholar, chronicle how interventionists like Power have provided important intellectual justifications for the sustenance of the military-industrial complex while channelling liberal opinion away from the antiwar and anti-imperialism of the 1960s. The authors observe that “during the past several decades the word genocide has increased in frequency of use and recklessness of application, so much so that the crime of the 20th century for which the term was originally coined often appears debased. They add that “just as the guardians of ‘international justice’ have yet to find a single crime committed by a great white northern power against people of color that crosses their threshold of gravity, so too all the fine talk about responsibility to protect and the end of impunity has never once been extended to the victims of these same powers, no matter how egregious their crimes.”

Building off of a model first developed in Herman and Noam Chomsky’s path-breaking book (sadly neglected among mainstream historians), The Political Economy of Human Rights: The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Herman and Peterson shed light on this process by which mainstream media and so-called human rights intellectuals like Power and her colleagues at the Harvard Carr Center for Human Rights, play into US government interests by broadcasting only those atrocities committed by opponents of the US. Sometimes mythical and sometimes real, these “nefarious” genocides and bloodbaths, as the authors term them, are usually exaggerated, taken out of political context or in some cases fabricated in order to advance a specific foreign policy objective or political agenda, including military intervention. The authors contrast these bloodbaths, with “constructive” and “benign” bloodbaths in which mass killings and atrocities are carried out by clients or allies of the US, or in which Washington is a major participant in mass killings and violence. In the latter case, little sympathy is exhibited towards the victims, while the perpetrators are lauded as valued allies of the West and for bringing stability, as was the case with General Suharto of Indonesia and Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam.

For Herman and Peterson, the Iraq sanctions regime and US invasion and occupation under George W. Bush (and now extended by Obama) represent “constructive” bloodbaths in contrast to the “nefarious” bloodbath carried out by Saddam Hussein in the Al-Anfal campaign against the Kurds in the 1980s which was only recognized years later in order to promote support for war. The scale of humanitarian devastation has been underplayed or ignored in the media and framed in a way that the US appears to be benevolent in its intent. Much like in the Vietnam War, when the US killed directly and indirectly an estimated 2-3 million people and destroyed the societal fabric, state propagandists such as New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman and CNN’s Michael Ware among others, claim that a US presence is actually needed to stave off a bloodbath.

Meanwhile, more than one million Iraqis have been killed as a result of the US invasion which was undertaken in violation of international law, Iraq’s cultural artefacts have been looted, several million people have been forced out of their homes and cities like Fallujah have been destroyed. Another half million were killed in the 1990s under the sanctions regime, including thousands of children who were denied proper drinking water, medicines and food. The war in Afghanistan represents another “constructive bloodbath” which is an act of aggression under the Nuremburg laws. American and NATO occupying forces and their warlord proxies have committed an untold number of civilian massacres, bombed wedding parties, systematically tortured prisoners of war and killed hundreds if not thousands of civilians in computerized Predator drone attacks in Pakistan, including over 100 in the village of Bola Baluk.

Israeli violence in the occupied territories (such as the recent invasion of Gaza) and Lebanon in 1982 (the Sabra and Shatilla massacre), US backed violence in Central America in the 1980s, and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975 are other cases of “benign” bloodbaths which did not arouse much media attention or the indignation of mainstream western intellectuals because they were carried out by US clients and were supported by Washington. In the propaganda system, according to Herman and Peterson, they thus don’t qualify as atrocities or acts of genocide, which can only be committed by official enemies.

Much like Hussein’s al anfal campaign, Cambodia in the 1970s represents one of the “nefarious bloodbaths.” Media commentators at the time expressed horror at the Khmer Rouge atrocities, while ignoring parallel atrocities by the US-backed Indonesia military in East Timor and by the US-backed the Lon Nol regime, which carried out pogroms against Vietnamese from 1970-1975 and allowed for massive US bombing attacks. According to Yale historian Ben Kiernan, these attacks killed several hundred thousand civilians and “drove an enraged peasantry into the arms of the Khmer Rouge,” helping to precipitate their reign of terror. A more recent “nefarious bloodbath” has taken place in Darfur, where Western moralists led by Power, New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof and Save Darfur spokesman John Prendergast have reduced complex political violence and killings to a simple morality play in which “evil” Arabs are systematically slaughtering innocent black Africans. They have in the process misrepresented the reality on the ground, contributed to the demonization of Islam and played into Washington’s foreign policy agenda in its aim of isolating China, a supporter of the Khartoum government. All the while they have provided a distraction from the more significant human rights atrocities carried out by the US in Af-Pak and Iraq and those committed by its allies in Ethiopia and the Congo, where the death toll is higher than in Darfur.

Herman and Peterson put into additional question whether genocide took place in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda during the 1990s, as was claimed by Power and other proponents of “humanitarian intervention.” In the former cases, they argue that while Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic was guilty of ethnic cleansing, many of the massacres attributed to his forces, including at Racak, were exaggerated in order to drum up support for a military intervention which was designed to provide legitimacy to NATO after the end of the Cold War. Undertaken without United Nations Security Council authorization, the NATO bombing constituted a “constructive bloodbath” which killed and displaced thousand of civilians, and caused a spiralling cycle of violence. And while Milosovic was guilty of his share of crimes, so were US allies, including Bosnian Muslim Alija Izetbegovic, an extremist who was openly pro-fascist and sympathetic to the Nazi Ustase movement in World War II, Croat Franjo Tudjman, another Nazi sympathizer responsible for perpetrating myriad atrocities, and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which was guilty of ethnic cleansing operations after the NATO bombings, and was heavily involved in the narcotics trade. None of these activities received any attention in Power’s book which transformed a complex civil war with myriad atrocities committed on all sides into a simple good versus evil tale. Recent scholarship confirms Herman and Peterson’s view. David Gibbs’ 2009 book, First Do No Harm, for example, shows that Washington along with Germany undermined diplomatic settlements after the break-up of Yugoslavia, strained the country’s economy by pushing for structural adjustment programs which created a climate ripe for war, and backed forces such as Izetbegovic and Tudjman implicated in terrible violence which was on par with that of Milosovic, or at best only slightly less criminal.

For Herman and Peterson, the 1994 “genocide” in Rwanda was another “nefarious” one because the victims were Tutsi whose leader Paul Kagame, head of the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF) had been trained in US military academies. Prior to his leading the RPF invasion of Rwanda in 1991, Kagame served as director of military intelligence under Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni, another Washington client, and with American backing, invaded the Congo in 1996 and again in 1997-98, leading to the death of five million people or more. The US supported the invasion under fraudulent pretexts because of a desire to tap into Congo’s rich resources and mineral wealth (including coltan, the material used to manufacture cell-phones) in the post-Mobutu era, and to gain strategic advantage in a region of growing importance. While characterized by western apologists as a the equivalent of Abraham Lincoln and the founding father of a new Africa, Kagame stands out, according to Herman and Peterson, as one of the outstanding mass murderers of the modern era, an equivalent of Idi Amin, whose major crimes against humanity have been whitewashed because he is a client of Washington. He continues to receive lavish support along with Museveni who is also responsible for mass atrocities in the Congo war, represses the northern acholi population and runs a domestic police state similar to Kagame.

Herman and Peterson present a revisionist history of the Rwandese “genocide” of 1994. The standard narrative holds that it was precipitated by the murder of Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana by “Hutu Power” extremists who could not accept a coalition government with the Tutsi, previously marginalized within Rwanda. The international community did not intervene because it did not care enough about the fate or people of Rwanda. According to Herman and Peterson the problem, however, is that the American power elite (and not necessarily US citizens who were clueless about what was actually going on) cared too much. Its main objective was to muscle out French and other European interests in the region, which were tied to the Habyarimana government, and so encouraged the retrenchment of UN troops as a means of ensuring Habyarimana’s fall and the US-trained Kagame’s rise to power. Drawing on an eight year French study report, they argue that it was the RPF and Kagame, and not Interhamwe (Hutu militia) extremists, which shot down president Habyarimana’s plane in 1994, precipitating the orgy of violence. Kagame according to their calculations was unwilling to accept a diplomatic settlement or power-sharing arrangement and allow for elections which the RPF were destined to lose.

Despite the romantic portrayals of it in the West, Herman and Peterson note that the RPF committed brutal atrocities after they sparked a civil war by invading Rwanda in 1991 from Uganda. In a secret memorandum drafted in September 1994 for the eyes of Secretary of State Warren Christopher, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) relayed their conclusion that the RPF and Tutsi civilian surrogates killed 10,000 or more Hutu civilians per month in a campaign of ethnic cleansing to clear areas south of Rwanda for Tutsi habitation. At the highest levels, American officials thus knew exactly what was going on and raised nary a concern for the Hutu victims since they were on the wrong side, much like with the million or so alleged PKI members slaughtered by the Indonesian military in 1965 (as is well documented in the leading scholarship on the topic).

Once in power, Kagame and the RPF continued the bloodletting in Congo where they hunted down Hutu refugees and slaughtered them in refugee camps and forests, using the pretext of a security threat. They went on to install as ruler of Congo Laurent Kabila, a former revolutionary and diamond smuggler, and then reinvaded when he began moving against RPF interests. Having tired of its former client Mobutu, who pillaged the country for over three decades, the Pentagon actively supported the two invasions, providing military weapons and training and teams of CIA and Special Forces operatives to assist their Rwandan and Ugandan clients. Besides the millions who have died in the conflict, countless more have suffered from displacement and disease in one of the world’s worst ever humanitarian catastrophes. It received little attention in the West, however, or by so-called human rights activists and the media and was never characterized as genocide like Darfur. When the plight of the war refugees was brought to light on the Oprah Winfrey show Washington’s complicity was never mentioned.

Herman and Peterson provide much evidence to back up their analysis and draw on leading scholarship for all the interventions which they discuss.

This is no conspiracy theory, though there are a few flaws in their reasoning, particularly with regards Rwanda. From research that I have done at the National Archives, I discovered that during the Cold War, the US supported the Hutu power governments of Gregoire Kayabinda (1960-1973) and Juvenal Habyarimana (1973-1994), and built up their security forces under the guise of police training programs because the Tutsi were seen as left-leaning and backed by Maoist China (a claim which was actually greatly overstated). Viewed by Hutu leaders as collaborators with the old colonial order, the Tutsi faced terrible repression in this period with US complicity. Many were forced into exile and were subjected to reprisal killings. They in turn organized in Uganda under the banner of the RPF to return to their homeland. For the dispossessed Tutsi, Kagame and his cohort Fred Rwigyema, who was killed during the initial phases of the 1991 invasion, are heroes. They are the equivalent of Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro whose revolutionary campaigns against the Batista dictatorship provided a model.

In order to present a fuller depiction of the crisis in Rwanda, the authors should acknowledge the historical injustice faced by the Tutsi and how it contributed to the growth of the civil war. In addition, the authors are too harsh on human rights organizations. While in some cases divorcing their analysis from a larger geopolitical framework, these groups do a lot of first-rate reporting. In the case of Rwanda, they provided significant documentation on the killings perpetrated by Hutu militias which whipped up hatred of the population in the face of the 1991 RPF invasion, deriding all Tutsis as “inyenzi,” kinyarwandan for cockroaches. Mass slaughters and genocide did indeed take place, though it was not one-sided and does not justify later RPF action.

On the question of the shooting down of Habyrimana’s plane, Herman and Peterson present a lot of evidence that make me question the standard narrative. Their portrayal of Kagame as ruthless and cunning Machiavelli-type is in my view correct and an important contribution of the book. African scholar Gerard Prunier, who wrote one of the standard histories on the genocide, now admits that he was captivated by the Tutsi narrative of events, but after more sustained study has realized that the RPF was no mere innocent force and was responsible for myriad atrocities during the civil war and later during its invasion of Congo. And in his book When Victims Become Killers, Columbia University scholar Mahmood Mamdani similarly shows how, rather than being a case of good versus evil or a repeat of the Jewish holocaust, the conflict was rooted in Rwanda’s colonial history and the artificial ethnic divisions that were socially constructed under German and Belgian rule. Both Hutu and Tutsi were at once victims and killers as a result of socio-historical circumstances. Dutch author Filip Reyntjiens, who has been expelled from Rwanda, shows most recently in his book The Great Congo War that Kagame and the RPF committed mass killings of Hutu refugees under the pretext of securing Rwanda’s border and plundered Congo’s resources through manipulation of proxy armies in the late 1990s. He also points to the US involvement through arms sales to the RPF and provides significant evidence that Special Forces operatives and the CIA provided direct combat support to Rwandese units as they invaded Congo.

Herman and Peterson’s analysis is thus for the most part sustained by leading scholarship, albeit again with a few points those leading scholars may object to. On the whole their work is illuminating and provocative, and challenges readers to think critically about the political manipulation of the term genocide and human rights to justify foreign interventions. In a conversation with former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans over the implementation of a new UN provision on the responsibility to protect (R2P), Noam Chomsky pointed to the need for a universal standard on human rights and to acknowledge western violations of international law. “If it’s a crime of somebody else, particularly an enemy, then we’re utterly outraged. If it’s our own crime, either comparable or worse, either it’s suppressed or denied. That works with almost 100 percent precision.”

True humanitarian intervention, if such a thing is possible, will require that we own up to our own atrocities and crimes and address the underlying factors shaping US support for vicious and reactionary regimes like those of Kagame and Museveni and their many counterparts. Until we do that, the calls among western intellectuals such as Samantha Power for military intervention to halt genocide will remain hollow and a mask for imperialism.