America and the Age of Genocide - A Problem from Hell

After loony Hitler and his acolytes killed 6 million Jews and millions of "undesirables" who didn't live up to Aryan standards, the Western World said, "never again." Ms. Power clearly shows how empty this promise was during the 20th Century. Her primary focus is on the United States due to us being the major superpower as well as a beacon to the rest of the world when it comes to human rights. The problem is we fall very short in the "never again" category. Heck, not only did U.S. Presidents consistently tiptoe around using the word 'genocide,' we directly or indirectly aided those who went on their killing sprees.

Ms. Power walks the reader through the invention of the word 'genocide' by Raphael Lemkin, a Holocaust survivor, and his lifelong effort to have the word become the standard for addressing the systemic effort to eliminate a specific group of people. The author highlights the 1915 massacre of Christian Armenians by the Turks; the Holocaust; the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; Saddam Hussein's attack on the Kurds; the Bosnian Serbs genocide against Croats and Muslims; and, lastly, the Hutus butchery of Tutsis in Rwanda. U.S. Presidents, politicians and the military knew full well that genocide was taking place but failed to act for numerous reason sighted in the book. Yes, even the hallowed Ronald Reagan is taken to the woodshed by the author. Ms. Power does especially harsh and correct assessments of Presidents George H.W. Bush's and Clinton's actions. Under President Clinton's watch, three acts of genocide occurred with him only finally acting after he viewed it as a political liability to his Presidency. Basically, Bubba and Bush-41 had no backbone and focused primarily on themselves above all others.

What I found most infuriating about the world's and U.S. actions is their fear of using the word 'genocide' when it is clearly what was occurring. There are numerous examples in the book of politicians being vague or blantantly lying to save face. Ms. Powers does, however, highlight some heroes who challenged the lying piles of manure known as our elected officials. When the book was published in 2002, the author rightly received oodles of awards and recognition. This is great history, wonderful analysis and challenges the reader be better critical thinkers when it comes to acts of atrocity. As 9/11 clearly showed, the United States doesn't live in a bubble. Ignoring acts of genocide not only takes away from our sense of humanity, but encourages other nutcases to even greater lengths of barbarity. The book is well worth your time if you give a damn about other people.

"George Bernard Shaw once wrote `The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.' After a century of doing so little to present, suppress, and punish genocide, Americans must join and thereby legitimate the ranks of the unreasonable." So concludes Powers in her book's final words (p. 516). It took me from 2003 to now, nearly seven years, to finish reading this, because the pain was so intense. Reading eyewitness account after eyewitness account, of unbelievably horrific atrocities against mothers, infants, husbands, sons, grandparents. It was all too close, given my grandfather's escape from the Armenian genocide, after he witnessed the murder of his own grandparents while he hid behind a couch. Thanks to friends and family who had read the book and encouraged me to push through to the finish, I picked it back up again in April, as I did every year, with Armenian Martyr's Day commemorated every April 24, for the intellectuals rounded up in Istanbul at the start of the Armenian genocide in 1915.
Unfortunately, the experience of reading this work can really be so disturbing I hardly recommend it with any pleasure. It's more like a duty to your fellow humans I suppose, to know what we are capable of, and to embolden your commitment to push your leaders to do the right thing. And that "right thing" gets very complicated, when you think about the duty to protect, when a people is threatened by its own government. While we owe people who are being exterminated our own military intervention to save them, that's also the kind rationale that supported the Iraq War under George W. Bush. So I'm unclear how you make the distinctions between what's justified and what's "aggression"--apparently the very bone of contention underway now regarding the International Criminal Court, itself created only eight years ago. Nevertheless, despite my ignorance and indecision on how to make such decisions better than Bush's administration did (based less on intelligence than on a culture of blindness to data, or lack thereof), I still recommend reading Powers if nothing else than for a rich understanding of the three-part pattern that leaders have used repeatedly to rationalize non-intervention: futility, perversity, and jeopardy. That is, Powers teaches you to beware of retreats from action based on the assumption that action would make no difference, could make things worse for the people themselves by sparking retaliation against them, or could jeopardize US interests in things like maintaining its own access to military bases around the world and the like.
While the book tends to repeat itself, that's often only because history did so, with genocide after genocide. And while Powers writes in a long-winded style at times, it all seems part of a necessary tradeoff to compiling a detailed and thoroughly footnoted study. A good read for anyone who has a passion for preventing such cruelty in future genocides.

The phrase, "A Problem From Hell" is a gripping metaphor of our troubled times. And this is a meticulously research and well-written (although a bit dense for my taste) book adequately covering the tip of the iceberg of that subject.

However, and meaning no disrespect to this brilliant author, it must be said that we have seen these sensitivities and sensibilities come and go before in the form of eagle scout exuberance, and mostly liberal-leaning "do-gooder" NGOs, and neophyte overly excitable roving reporters. And while we could throw up a whole of wall of clichés that would better make my larger point, it must be said that "trading in" self-righteous indignation" very much after the fact is a "detail" but hardly a policy prescription, and certainly not a useful way to solve complex international problems.

Yes, it is true that rather than enter World War I, which would surely have been the result had the U.S. intervened on behalf of the Armenians against the Turks in 1915-1916 does leave a lasting bitter taste in the mouth. Or, the same can be said for the rationalizations against bombing the railroads leading to the Nazi concentration camps, or not allowing more Jews fleeing those horrors to enter the U.S., or moving too slowly and too late in Yugoslavia, or not at all to stop the genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda - and even today, of making sweet sounding noises but doing nothing in Darfur.

And although, as the last standing superpower we may have had (and may still have) a "special responsibility" to use our power to intervene in many of these instances, we are not the only members of the international community that must live with the moral guilt of our own international cowardliness and "chosen ability" not to act to save hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.

Despite this, since every U.S. President who has had to face an ongoing questions of genocide, has also found convenient ways to either ignore or rationalize them away, we must ask the question at the subtext of this research: Are these then all just matters of cold-blooded raw calculations of rational decision making? Or simply just cases of weighing national means and costs against rational ends and returns to the national interests? Rather than questions of pure morality? Or is there something deeper going on here?

Far be it for me to rain on the author's award winning parade.

However it must be said, if only in passing, that it is curious indeed how a book on genocide can take the U.S to task and at the same time simply leap frog right over the most sordid aspects of the U.S. own genocidal history and find a neat landing in an island clearing that is as morally pristine as it is naive:

Neither the genocide against Native Americans nor against African Americans during slavery merited even so much as a footnote in the book, apparently neither was relevant enough to be mentioned, even once. Like a cat, somehow the author manages to land on both feet in a clearing on the other side of this historical messiness with her humanity, morality, innocence and self-righteous indignation, all still unperturbed and perfectly intact. How can this be done?

If genocide at home has no more moral meaning or consequence than that, then maybe doing nothing is the prefect answer to all genocide, whether home or abroad, and whether in the past, present or the future. If we use past U.S. sensitivity to genocide as a guide, one would be led to ask: Where is the problem? Maybe the author is doing exactly what one raised in the U.S. should do: pretend that that there is no connection between the past and the future, and just keep leaping over to the next moral clearing. After all we did not fail to sign the International Treaty Against Genocide without a good reason?

This moral prestidigitation of course has its own precedents and raises its own separate questions: Can a nation that fails to confront honestly the genocide in its own closeted past really be expected to intervene when it occurs in the international arena? Yes, it is sad that in every instance that we had the chance to, except Yugoslavia, we failed to muster the moral strength and courage to intervene. But it is infinitely sadder not to realize that this cowardliness stems in part, directly from our own domestic home-grown genocidal experiences. As a final note, perhaps it is a little known fact that it was the U.S. Eugenics program that served as the model for Hitler's "Final Solution. What is the cliché about charity begins at home?

Four Stars

Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell is a stunning indictment of bureaucratic apathy in the time of some of the century's greatest mass murders. It starts with the Armenian genocide by the Turks and from there goes from the ratification of the Genocide Convention by Raphael Lemkin (in the middle of the Holocaust) and onto present-day atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Power's voice is assured as she lays out the facts of each genocide, its historical roots, its horrifying details, and the myriad ways the UN and the United States failed to act in any way that would markedly deter further casualties. The end result is an incredibly important educational book with a cold backbone of steel under its empathetic exterior. Power's research is remarkable, both for its even-handed tone as well as the basic solutions she offers that in hindsight would have seemed reasonable, but were too covered in red tape at the time to have been implemented. The US President is indicted for ambivalence along with standard Dutch troops, yet there is a ray of light at the end with the successful bombing of Kosovo and a more stringent US foreign policy towards genocide that may in the future lead to faster action were it to rise again in the world's more violent countries. In any case this is necessary reading, fully deserving of its Pulitzer, and an articulate clarion call to recognizing and eradicating the worst crime on Earth.

Originally published in 2002, "A Problem from Hell" is an impressive survey of U.S. policy in response to genocide in the 20th century. Samantha Power tells the gripping story of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jew who coined the word. His life was simultaneously heroic and tragic. In his tireless struggle to establish an international law making genocide a punishable crime, Lemkin had neither time for women or proper meals. As his suit was getting more and more untidy, people started avoiding him, growing ever more annoyed at his persistent lobbying. When he collapsed of a heart attack aged fifty-nine, "his blazer (was) leaking papers at the seams." He died destitute and only seven people turned up at his funeral. Nevertheless, just a few years later nearly seventy countries had ratified the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide - Lemkin's Law.
A few other diehards passed on Lemkin's torch. Power tells a captivating story of a long and frustrating, but ultimately successful struggle. She sometimes describes the driving force behind these people as were it a disease; they have been smitten and cannot sleep at night. They do something against better judgment, often cutting right through party-lines. Without them, nothing much would be gained. With the big political machinery lagging behind, change seems to be dependent on individuals and their tireless efforts. In another book they might have been called heroes, but when senator Proxmire decided to mention genocide every time he spoke in the Senate between 1967 and 1986, one might also describe him as being a nuisance. Power neatly illustrates this in a table of all his 3.211 speeches.
Definitions are always tricky, and "genocide" is certainly no exception. Lemkin sought a word that would "chill listeners and invite immediate condemnation," as Power puts it. It should be a short word that conveys instant revulsion and indignation. Lemkin called it an "index of civilization." In a legal matter there's always room for dispute: what exactly constitutes a case of genocide? And then it's often bound to be after the fact, like for example in Rwanda. But despite critics, today the UN war crimes tribunal at The Hague has a staff of over 1.000 and the budget has risen from $11 million in 1994 to $ 96 million in 2000. In 2001 it held forty-eight inmates and general Krstic, co-responsible for the massacre at Srbrenica, has been sentenced to forty-six years in prison.
Power defines seven cases of genocide: the Armenian, the Holocaust, the gassing of Kurds by Saddam Hussein, the Pol Pot reign of terror, Srebrenica, Rwanda and Kosovo. It's terrible reading, but I still could not put the book down. It's every bit as poignant and judicious as both Tony Judt's "Reappraisals" and Jonathan Glover's "Humanity".
Her most important conclusion is, somewhat unexpectedly, that the slow acting of the U.S. should not be considered a failure. Rather, its acting, or lack thereof, reflects official U.S. policy. Power argues that it has by and large been successful; there has been little threat to American interests and there have been no significant political costs. "Troubling though it is to acknowledge, U.S. officials worked the system and the system worked." As Tzvetan Todorov also argues in his short book "The New World Disorder", the most important American priorities are to defend its security and national interests. "This is not in the slightest dishonorable," says Todorov. True, but confronted with genocide, a moral obligation must also play a key role. Genocide transcends "mere" politics and makes an appeal to all of humanity. Samantha Power makes this point with verve and conviction.

I was extremely skeptical about Power's ability to create a persuasive thesis in favor of intervention in cases of genocide. Clearly, a moral case exists, and no one questions that. But a government does not function on morals. A government does not have friends, enemies, ideal. A government has interests, and it works to promote those interests in whatever ways that it can. The first couple examples of genocide in the book were cases where a humanitarian intervention to stop the killings would actually have gone against American interests (i.e. Cambodia and Iraq). In these cases, the U.S. government had an interest in the government of the perpetrators of genocide. But Power's thesis really takes on flesh when she looks at cases where American interests actually coincide with the prevention and cessation of genocide. Thus, it is particularly damning that even when in cases where national interests and genocide cessation coincide, the United States still does not become involved militarily. And it is through these case studies Power's statement become crystal clear: The prevention and cessation of genocide in itself IS America's interests, be they geo-political, economic, idealistic, or (god-forbid) moral.
If Power is surprisingly persuasive in the defense of her main thesis, she is less so in what the United States should actually do. At times it seems like Power might agree with the United States throwing around military might occasionally to prevent the success of genocidal regimes, a tenet that is hard to swallow. And it does seem to be military intervention that Power promotes. When the U.S. does take steps to affect genocide policies (i.e. sanctions, embargoes, etc), Power invariable deems it a failure, which makes me wonder why she thinks other actions would guarantee success. There is a bit of idealism that borders on naivete.
The biggest drawback of this book is that it seems to repeat the same tale over and over again, which I suppose is the point, to show how the U.S. ignored genocide in Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda. But the chapters about each region starts to read the same. Really, I am not sure I would have gotten through the book had I not taken some long rests to break up the repitition.

In this exhaustively researched book, Power examines the United States of America's reaction to the notion of genocide in the twentieth century, examining some of the greatest tragedies of the era, and the individuals who tried, either positively or negatively, to shape the American reaction to them. This is not a one-sided, leftist rant against a great power - rather it is a considered look at the fact that the US uses the genocide convention to suit itself, both the feel-good-look-good factor of agreeing with its worth and the political expediency of denying its implementation. This is not to say that the US is always at fault when it comes to preventing or stopping genocidal actions - and Power notes this, especially in reaction to the obvious genocide in Africa - but as the largest power in the 20th century, the US was often the nation that was in a position to decide if action was to be carried out or not. This is not so much a study in human misery (though there is plenty in this book) or the brave individuals attempting to discourage it (though there are many of those in this book too- the most outstanding being Major General Romeo Dallaire, commander of UN peacekeeping troops in Rwanda when the great troubles broke out) but a study in the politics of genocide and intervention. Well written and well sourced, don't be put off by the page count - you can easily divide this book into manageable sections. But it should be read by all people who are interested in world affairs, even if only to compare America's previous inaction when it suited them to their ability to intervene in another country when they believe it is in their interest.

Because of its democratic principles and military might, the United States has been viewed by the world as a moral authority for most of the twentieth century. The United States has claimed the chief role in defeating communism and making the world safe for democracy. However a closer examination of the actions behind the speeches reveals a pattern of economic and geopolitical interests taking precedence over humanitarian concerns, even cases of genocide.

Samantha Power, a human rights professor from Harvard University, expressed her surprise and frustration over the history of non-response that the United States has accumulated regarding foreign cases of genocide. Power cited the slaughter left in the wake of the Turkish, the Nazis, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein and the Hutus of Rwanda, and examined how the United States may have verbally condemned the occurrences, but failed to back up their words with meaningful force.

When Power tried to warn the Washington Post of an upcoming genocide in Bosnia, she was negated until something more newsworthy came along. Genocide followed. She found that her actions followed a similar pattern of voices of warning that cry in the wilderness which are subsequently ignored. Henry Morgenthau's warnings about Turkey, Raphael Lemkin's prescient comments about Nazi Germany, William Proxmire's determined efforts for passage of law, and Peter Galbraith's advocacy for Kurds provide insight into what could have been avoided if human life had a higher priority than diplomatic protocol or political timidity.
Power effectively put a face on the incomprehensible numbers involved with genocide.

For example, she opened her preface, as well as chapter one, with a gripping tale of a single murder. In the preface, a school aged girl was killed while jump roping; in chapter one, a man who had coordinated the killings of one million Armenians was shot as revenge for his actions. She often relayed the words of those who somehow managed to escape death and who thus were able to speak for the dead. She organized her analysis into several categories: "Warning," usually from a lone voice or two who are very familiar with the area; "Recognition," official documents testify of the knowledge deep within the State Department or presidential cabinet, but often not made public knowledge; "Response," or more often, lack thereof, due to feelings of futility, perversity, or jeopardy (acting won't matter or will make it worse); and then finally "Aftermath," an analysis of what has happened since the genocide.
Power detailed Henry Morgenthau's experience as U.S. ambassador to Turkey during the slaughter of Armenian Christians. Morgenthau's sensibilities occasionally took precedence over the diplomatic tradition of not interfering with the internal affairs of a nation. Talaat Pasha, the Turkish interior minister who headed up the force to rid Turkey of Armenians, was aghast that Morgenthau would actually care about these Christians when Morgenthau himself was a Jew. Talaat was clueless why Morgenthau would complain. Morgenthau found a similarly frustrating experience dealing with the neutrality policy of Woodrow Wilson. Eventually he resigned in frustration. His advice remained unheeded and events became calamitous.

As a child in Poland, Raphael Lemkin followed the events in Turkey. He developed an early interest in fighting genocide and vandalism, and devoured books upon the subject. Fifteen years later Lemkin found a similarly horrible series of events unfolding in Nazi Germany. Similar to Morgenthau's (and Power's) experience, Lemkin encountered a brick wall when he tried to warn the League of Nations. Power cited Lemkin's expressions of frustration, but they clearly reflected her own. "The crime of barbarity repeated itself with near `biological regularity.' But Lemkin clearly saw that people living in peacetime were clearly going to have difficulty hearing, never mind heeding, warning pleas for early action."

Lemkin understood that Nazi atrocities were simply beyond comprehension of a civilized people, and decided that the first step on this long journey was to coin a new term to encapsulate the incomprehensible. He came up with the word "genocide," which eventually did take hold as the term for such events. By sheer force of will and persistence, Lemkin convinced the members of the UN to listen to him and draft his proposals. However, Lemkin found the U.S. a harder sell than the U.N., as the U.S. was reluctant to give up elements of sovereignty and economic concerns. The futility of Lemkin's battle against the American legislative brick wall was underscored by Lemkin dying penniless and friendless, his life worn out by his mission. Only seven people attended his funeral.
Senator William Proxmire (D- Wisc) picked up the dropped baton in 1967 and told "a largely uninterested, deserted Senate chamber" of his intention not to let this issue die, despite the need to step on some political toes. Typical of the reaction to Senator Proxmire's exhortations was the response of one junior State Department official. "Do you know of any official whose career has been advanced because he spoke out for human rights?"

In stark contrast, the touching words of Prince Sirik Matak expressed the betrayed American Dream. As he was led to his Khmer Rouge executioners, Matak invoked the voice of so many desperate people before him. "As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would abandon a people which had chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it.... If I die here on this spot in my country that I love.... I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans."

The rise of the Khmer Rouge occurred on the heels of American involvement in Vietnam. For once, an American leader, President Gerald Ford, foresaw some of the horrors that would accompany a KR/ Communist takeover of the government of Cambodia. Unfortunately, the American public and its representatives in Congress were tired and believed top officials were crying wolf once more, perhaps to gain more aid or to prevent one more domino from falling. Elizabeth Becker, a young reporter for the Washington Post whom Power described as looking like a teenager, attempted to tell the story, but yet again, institutional forces quieted her warnings. Yet neither she, nor other voices of warning such as George McGovern, fully comprehended what was beyond the deep shroud surrounding the Khmer Rouge.

By 1978, three years after the Khmer Rouge had overtaken Phnom Penh and two million Cambodians were killed, the citizens were ironically saved not by the Americans, but by the old enemy, the Vietnamese. Although the U.S. couldn't be blamed for not knowing the full extent of the atrocities, they chose to do nothing when they could have done something. "For neither the first, nor the last time, geopolitics trumped genocide. Interests trumped indignation." (Power, 142). The U.S. continued to support the Khmer Rouge over the Vietnamese occupation, in part because the U.S. wanted to continue fostering a relationship with China.

The U.S. Senate finally passed the genocide convention in 1986, the 97th nation to do so, only after the law had had its teeth removed (by removing U.S. subordination to an international court) and Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.) was able to get a couple of Republican judges appointed in exchange for his vote. Ironically, the first chance to use the new law came within a year, as Saddam Hussein and his cousin Ali led a mass execution of Kurds in northern Iraq. The U.S. again put economic concerns above humanitarian ones, and continued to support Iraq's regime by supplying subsidies and wheat. With Iraq currently at war with Iran, the U.S. found itself in a similarly awkward situation as with Cambodia/ Vietnam. Which was the lesser evil? Memories of the 444 days trumped the humanitarian concerns regarding Saddam versus the Kurds, and the U.S. continued its support for Hussein, and did not choose to believe Iran's claims of Iraqi genocide. Finally, in 1991, Hussein stepped too far. While the Kurds did not represent a political interest of those in Congress, Kuwait did, and Congress finally passed a resolution to put a stop to Hussein's aggression. Power struck a hopeful note when she described the camps set up for Kurdish refuges along the Turkish border shortly after the 1991 Iraq War. For once, a small piece of hope emerged as America fulfilled a promise to the world.

After reading "Love Thy Neighbor" (another must read), I purchased "The Problem from Hell" and found it hit far more emotional chords. Anyone who thinks that national politicians should be chosen based on what they can do for their country needs to read this. We need more politicians - in particular in the U.S. and major powers - who see the responsible role every such country must play in the global community. It is appalling and embarassing to realize just how many times in the past decade alone the countries of the world have just stood back and watched while barbaric acts against innocent others went on unimpaired. Makes me want to dump the U.N. as a useless stage show unable and unwilling to take any real action. When such situations as described in this book happen, it is time for action, not fruitless negotiations. And it was the Democrats and the Republicans in the U.S. as well as every major world power including England and Canada who have failed to go beyond the politics of words while literally millions of innocent people have died. Armenia, Cambodia, Germany, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq - not a lesson learned. I doubt that anyone can read this book without asking "how can we let things like this go on in the 21st century?".

In 1994, during the ongoing genocide in Rwanda, Christine Shelley, the Department of State spokesperson, tried to explain the official American view of what was happening in Rwanda. In doing so, she offered one of the most perverse exchanges ever on the issue of genocide: "we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred in Rwanda." "What's the difference between acts of genocide and genocide?" asked a journalist. "Clearly not all of the killings that have taken place in Rwanda are killings to which you might apply that label"; "how many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?" the journalist pressed; "that's not a question that I'm in a position to answer."
This frustrating exchange, coming more than two months into a genocide that ultimately claimed 800,000 lives, is testament to the pervasive influence that the term genocide has acquired in the public mind. It is also evidence that the long efforts of Raphael Lemkin, who conjured up the concept of genocide in 1933, baptized it a decade later, and converted it into an international crime in 1948, had finally paid off. Lemkin had achieved part of what he dreamed: to create a word that would trigger the imagination and moral outrage necessary to cause good people to prevent such horrific acts of barbarity and inhumanity.
Samantha Power, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, traces the history of genocide in the twentieth century by focusing on how America reacted to the genocides it had to confront in the past hundred years: that in Turkey against the Armenians, in Hitler's Germany, in Cambodia, in Iraq, in Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia. The book, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, synthesizes an amazing array of information that together combine for the most authoritative review of the subject. Blending together her journalistic instinct for story-telling, her writer's gift for precision and concision, and her historian's eye, she produces a masterful account that navigates between the human tragedy of genocide and the cold political calculus of responding to it.
Her verdict is as indictable as her hope is refreshing. The failure to prevent genocide rests on a complex nexus that leads political reasoning to favor inaction. An inability to imagine how terribly human beings can act when fueled with hatred, a perverse belief that action will do little good, a political calculus that punishes commission more so than omission, and a supposed handicap in obtaining a clear picture of what is happening all conspire to allow American policymakers to rationalize inaction, even when faced with overwhelming evidence that their intervention is essential to save thousands or even millions.
But the story is not all depressing. From the Armenian genocide in 1915, policymakers have been willing to stand up and demand that their country act. Sadly, their appeals have been met with little excitement, and often they have proven professionally suicidal. Yet, there is certainly a learning curve; the fear of reliving "another Rwanda," for example, has a powerful institutional influence that may prompt action in the future. What is certain is that if this wholesale tilt in American foreign policy is ever to become a reality, "A Problem from Hell" will have played a major role in bringing it about.

This is a penetrating history of the course of twentieth century genocide, including the history of the invention of the neologism by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who warned about Hitler's designs in the 1930's, but was unheard. The book opens with Lemkin's heroic efforts during and after the war up to his stalking the corridors and cafeterias of all the relevant institutions of the era, especially the UN, attempting to promote a genocide convention, and badgering diplomats to listen. The portrait of his persistence is telling, and is succeeded by the account of Senator Proxmire and his decades of daily speeches on ratification. The book details the at best sluggish, if not inert, response of the United States to all the outbreaks of genocide in the twentieth century, from the Armenian genocide to Kosovo and Rwanda. Diplomats tend to be Sunday school graduates who go on to diplomatic colleges where devoted philosophical study of the principles of Machiavel induce them to do the 'right thing'. The problem is that intervention would cynically be the excuse of empire. But the world has no true international community and we live still in a barbarous age dressed up in technocratic pretension.

It's a well documented and informed review of all the genocides of the last century and the role the U.S. played in all of them, mostly as a silent witness turning a blind eye when it was happening. Even helping economically those who were commiting it. It's chilling to read what humans are capable of doing to other fellow beings. But it's more impressive to see that the rest of the world didn't care at all! As Ortega y Gasset said, the worst crime is not commited by those who kill, but by those who don't kill but allow others to do so. We have to learn (although I pretty much doubt it) from history, and do all we can to stop it from happening again. Because amazingly enough today's genocide is against the U.S. Now more than ever U.S. citizens are the target just for the simple fact of being Americans. Just because they belong to the "wrong nation". There is so much hatred in the world today and it's so sad that human beings have to die every day because they were born with the wrong size, the wrong skin color, the wrong religion, in the wrong nation... and I still ask myself who decides what's wrong to take someone elses life? Who? And most of all; why?

As I write the world has just commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, including the obligatory refrain of "never again." But in the Darfur region of western Sudan about a million people have been displaced and poured into eastern Chad, fleeing systematic rape, pillage and burning of villages by government-backed Janjaweed militias whose goal is to purge the country of their darker skinned fellow Muslims.

What has the world done? Pretty much nothing. Once you read Samantha Power's book you will not be surprised. Power's long treatise won a Pulitzer and virtually unanimous praise as a brilliant volume on a disturbingly familiar problem in our world.

Power traces the history of the term "genocide," a neo-logism created by the eccentric and brilliant Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who almost single-handedly thrust the issue of genocide onto the world stage. On October 16, 1950, after seventeen years of Lemkin's labor, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was finally ratified by the United Nations. She also traces the history of the world's major genocides--Armenia, Jews, Cambodia, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo.

It took the United States thirty-eight years to sign the convention; ninety-seven nations had ratified the convention before us (p. 165). This is consistent with our overall history and response to genocide, Power concludes. Across time, place, ideology and geopolitics, the US has remained consistently passive in the face of genocide. Despite graphic images and evidence of genocide, we lack the moral imagination to believe the unbelievable. Politicians calculate that the indifference of the public means their own indifference will cost nothing, whereas involvement in genocides can be very costly. In short, we are a nation of predictable "bystanders" when it comes to genocide.

Through dispassionate, investigative analysis, Samantha Powers exposes the consistently disgusting U.S. track record of indifference to genocides. Emotional rhetoric is avoided, as outrage is stirred by the facts recorded, including the lame alibis offered by Powers' interviewees (over 300). Again for emphasis, this book is not a rant, a frustrated catharic vent, but an extraordinarily well-documented, applicable introspection that identifies (and debunks) excuses and explains approaches to prevention, to punishment, and to intervention, reviewing the range of options available to the individual and to the nation. Powers quotes Sen. Paul Simon: "'If every member ot the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different.'" This is an awareness-raising book, an equipping book, an empowering book.

As many Pullitzer prize winning books often fall to high expectations, alas, there is one which does not. Samantha Power's amazingly well researched analysis of American (and worldly) foreign policy during times of genocide is a rare breed, in that it delivers to the level which any "gold star" book is expected to.
Power, a highly qualified author for a book on a subject like genocide, obviously had great passion for the premise behind this book. Each argument she sets forth is backed up not only with hard evidence (which believe me, there is a bounty of), but also of her own experiences. Therefore, this book flows like a novel, but has the logicality of a textbook.
The one area in which this book loses some points (and it is not a glaring problem, but forced me to give a 4, since 5 merits only near perfection), is that a few of Power's assertions (mostly in the chaper on Kosovo) are highly debatable. She begins to disregard the obstacles which the U.S. government faced. This disappointed me because her other assertions took into full-mind these problems. However, as I stated just one moment ago, ten of her eleven chapters are carefully thought out.
In the end, I feel that anyone who wishes to offer an informed view of American foreign policy must read this book. It includes a wealth of information which proves Power's bold claims, and as a result does not leave much room for an equally respectable retort. Secondly, this book, like almost every Pullitzer Prize winner in the nonfiction category, is superbly written in stark and powerful prose.

This is a heartbreakingly painful book to read. It took me almost a month to get through it because I simply couldnÕt stand to read more than a small bit at a time. Yes, there are heroes and heroines here -- people who strove again and again to save victims of genocide. But if youÕre anything like me, when you finish "A Problem From Hell" you will know far more about how monstrously human beings can behave than you want to believe. "Evil" seems too mild a word to describe it. And you will also see what in some ways is even worse -- the ease with which "good" people can ignore mass murder.
Nevertheless, as difficult as it is to read, this is an important, extremely well-researched, and clearly and concisely-written book, and IÕd recommend it highly (even urgently) to anyone who has an interest in American foreign policy. And even those who think they don't.
At the end of World War II, the world swore that "never again" would we stand by while millions were slaughtered. Samantha Power deals with selected post-war examples of times when the world failed to live up to that promise -- in Cambodia, Iraq, Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, it would be easy to add several more to her list. In fact, sheÕs been criticized -- from both the right and left -- for some examples she left out of the analysis. However, I feel strongly that her focus on the four late twentieth century genocides makes this a better book than it otherwise would have been. The limited number of examples allows Power to explore deeply both the differences and the similarities between these genocides.
The differences are important because so often that is what both the press and the government focus on. We misinterpreted the genocide in Cambodia because the Khmer Rouge was not murdering members of an ethnic group, but political and class enemies. Saddam Hussein targeted an ethnic group -- the Kurds -- but the Kurds were rebelling against the government at that time, so it was possible to view the situation as more an overly harsh attempt to put down a rebellion than as a genocide.
But, as Power shows, focusing on how each example was different from the Holocaust was less a misunderstanding than it was an excuse for inaction. There are plenty of other excuses. We canÕt be sure if the victimsÕ stories are accurate. We see the victims fight back and think they are just as guilty as the perpetrators. We are worried that acting may create more problems than it solves. But mostly it just comes down to this: most Americans are not very interested in what goes on outside our country and no politician has ever been voted out of office for failing to intervene abroad. Under those circumstances, only the best and the bravest will stand up.
And intervention does not necessarily mean military intervention (although that certainly canÕt be ruled out). One of the most interesting conclusions of PowerÕs book is that the world is hampered in responding to signs of genocide because we think that noticing that it is taking place will require us to act militarily. Not wanting to go to war, we pretend that the genocide is not taking place. But, as Power quite convincingly argues, there are many indications that by taking early strong stands against a country murdering its own citizens, we can stop it. When we refuse to even condemn the killing, we only encourage the thugs in power to go farther.
This book raises issues that as citizens and moral human beings we all should be grappling with.

Can a book become timelier as it gets older? With the world being less than forthright in stopping yet another genocide in Sudan, the potential inter-ethnic violence in Iraq, Saddam Hussein's impending trail, the global popularity of "Hotel Rwanda," the 90th anniversary of Turkey's massacre of Armenians, and the trans-Atlantic rift inhibiting the world's most powerful countries from coordinating policy objectives, the answer is a resounding "yes". Power's book is not only an interesting, shocking, and sometimes embarrassing read, it is stunningly relevant today. It is most useful in laying out our "problem from hell" in all its complexity, and acknowledges that slogans such as "never again" and "do something" are not enough, and the policies that flow from the will to "do something" aren't quite as popular as the will itself.

The book begins in Germany, 1921, when a man named Mehmed Telaat is assassinated by a 24 year-old Armenian man. This assassination was in retaliation for the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915, where the assassin's entire family was killed and where Telaat played the role of Goebbels. Thus, the Armenian genocide is Power's starting point in her examination of genocide in the 20th century, and it is so for many reasons: its was an atrocious crime in itself killing over a million; it marks the first genocide of the century; it is the first that western powers chose not to intervene in what-so-ever, despite being aware of it; it was a formative experience for Hitler, who prophetically says "Who remembers the Armenians?", and Raphael Lemkin, the creator of the word "genocide" and author of the future Genocide convention; and it marks a pattern of response that the United States unfailingly follows in confronting genocide. The book then moves on to look at the genocides of the Holocaust, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and Kosovo. The book also explores the creation and confusion of the word "genocide" and the problems encountered in creating legislation against it.

Most relevant, Power explores why the US has failed to respond to genocide. Among the usual inhibitors to action: other often legitimate foreign policy priorities, the fear of not being "even handed", and seeing the current crisis through the prism of the pervious one (such as seeing Rwanda as a potential Somalia, which it already had been for the Belgians). But its not only the US government that drops the ball. Other able governments and even NGO's such as Human Rights watch have been guilty of "punting" on recommending solutions to genocide, such as the use of force. But none of these excuses allow us to say that our inaction was anything other than utter failure. We are responsible for both our "incredulity" and our inaction.

Thus, Power comes away with an interesting conclusion, namely, the United States must often take the lead, both diplomatically and militarily, in dealing with genocide. In her discussion of Rwanda, she argues that we could have "intervened unilaterally" and later she states that it sometimes might be necessary to eschew "diplomatic niceties" as we confront genocide. While she does warn against the false choice of "doing nothing or unilaterally sending in the marines", the option of force is at least still on the table. Thus we can say "under certain, necessary circumstances, the US can use military action for liberal ends." Is there a better definition for neo-conservatism? Power is by no means part of this group, though I doubt she would run from them in horror. Nevertheless, this book will fit nicely on the shelves of both the neo-con and the multi-lateralist liberal (not that these categories are mutually exclusive).

Ultimately, the jury is still out on whether September 11th will be a catalyst for an interventionist policy that doesn't hesitate in the face of genocide or a more isolationist policy that fears that interfering (sometimes forcefully) into other people's business is the key source of the world's "ill will". This book would doubtlessly shape the thought of any policy maker who reads it. Liberals can learn that taking unpopular, military means is sometimes necessary to liberal ends, and triumphalist conservatives can learn that the US has not always been the protector of the world's oppressed, that the Europeans are not always weak-kneed, and that "national interests" narrowly defined often fails to serve our interests in the long run. No matter where your political instincts lay, this book will challenge them.

With regard to genocide, Samantha Power tells us that "time and again, decent men and women chose to look away. We have all been bystanders to genocide. The crucial question is why" (p. xvi). "The book's major findings can be summarized as follows
* "Despite graphic media coverage, American policymakers, journalists, and citizens are extremely slow to muster the imagination needed to reckon with evil....
* "....American political leaders interpret society-wide silence as an indicator of public indifference.... Potential sources of influence...do not generate political pressure sufficient to change the calculus of America's leaders.
* "The U.S. government...takes very few steps along a continuum of intervention to deter genocide.
* [We talk the proverbial talk but don't walk the proverbial walk:] "....they can in good conscience favor stopping genocide in the abstract, while simultaneously opposing American involvement in the moment"(pp. xvii, xviii).

Also in speaking of crimes against humanity, another author recalled words "of the famous French priest, Lacordaire, in speaking of the pathway to holiness: 'It is proper for the noblest hearts to discover the most urgent need of their epoch and to consecrate themselves to it'....many of those who strive for holiness today will consecrate themselves to the most urgent need of our epoch: namely, putting an end to the wholesale slaughter of the innocents" (p. 1).

It is certainly true that the second author acknowledged inappropriate behavior of his own. Yet, his analysis rang true, when he claimed that the Church had "failed to marshall the spiritual resources at its disposal.... The Medieval poet Dante Alleghieri (1265-1321), is supposed to have said that 'the hottest places of hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality" (pp. 4, 5).

Failure to honor the absolute dignity of each and every human life is what is common to crimes against humanity. As a third author recently noted, "the failure to acknowledge the humanity and dignity of all persons has lurked at the root of every racial caste system" (p. 259).

This powerful and chastening book is a detailed account of American official responses to the recurrent genocides of the 20th century. Power begins with the slaughter of the Armenians by Turkish nationalists in WWI, goes through the Holocaust, Cambodia, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein's attack on the Kurds, and the disasters that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Much of the book is a detailed analysis of American response to the more recent events, notably Cambodia, Rwanda, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo. For the sake of completeness, I'd like to mention that Power doesn't cover all the genocides of the last century. The massacres in Burundi and the mass killings in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) are barely mentioned.
What did the US do about these atrocities? The short answer is that US policy has been consistently not to do much of anything about these events. This has been true regardless of which party has been in power and regardless of whether administrations have been relatively liberal or conservative. Even worse, there are several examples of American administrations either implicitly (Cambodia) or explicitly (Hussein's Iraq) aiding governments engaged in genocidal activities. The hypocrisy of several administrations is simply startling and has ironic dimensions. Several important policy makers in the first Bush administration disparaged humanitarianism and support for human rights as appropriate responses to Saddam Hussein's genocidal attacks on the Kurds on northern Iraq. Some of these individuals are now prominent in the present Bush administration and use humanitarian arguments to justify the present Iraq policy. This type of hypocrisy is matched only by the behavior of the Clinton administration during the Rwanda and Bosnia crises. This is a shameful record and many chapters make for very depressing reading.
It appears that it is very difficult to mobilize our system to do much about genocidal events. Kosovo is an interesting counter-example. Only when a number of important Clinton administration policy makers and members of Congress, and public opinion were in favor military intervention was it possible for efforts to be made to intervene successfully. When only a few influential figures are in favor of intervention, it is hard to accomplish much. Senator Dole, in probably the most distinguished episode of his long political career, was an outspoken advocate for the Bosnian Muslims. Despite his considerable influence, there was little support for intervention in either his own party or the Clinton administration for appropriate intervention.
A good part of the book is devoted to the efforts of individuals in the US who attempt to persuade our governments to pursue more aggressive policies towards genocides. What is striking is how isolated many of these individuals become. The obessive Polish-American lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and worked tirelessly for international conventions against genocide,is the archetype of these individuals. At this death, Lemkin was a penniless fringe figure. What progress we have seen, howwver, is due in large part to the efforts of these quixotic people.
Power ends with a short final chapter that contains some actual policy prescriptions. These are generally sensible, even modest, but hard to implement in our political system. This is not an indictment of Power's suggestions but rather of a political system that doesn't place a great deal of value on human life.

In this book Samantha Power focuses on the history of genocide in the 20th Century and the American government's responses in a way that goes beyond simply recounting the horrific details. By juxtaposing these two elements the book lead me to view this ever-current topic - the penchant to kill ethnicities - in a way that left me asking questions I'd never thought to ask before.
I am no stranger to the topic of genocide. My grandmother escaped the Turkish/Kurdish slaughter and deportation of Armenians in 1915 and told us her tale until she died at 94! The best revenge is survival. But Power's book raised questions in my mind that are generally left from the discourse of American life.
How do we respond to genocide? Are we people of a nation or people of the world? Should a politically-constructed border really justify inaction? And if we resolve to take action, what is that action? Is force alone enough? Or do we need a paradigm shift in our view of our responsibility to human beings across the globe?
A Problem From Hell is a profound book. I thought and felt things I'd never considered before.
I highly recommend this book. Every page expanded my view of the world.

While this book is far from perfect, it certainly is the most comprehensive examination of the issue of genocide that I have come across. It's also an extremely compelling condemnation of America's lack of will in responding to genocide when it occurs.
Power begins with a look at the origins of the term "genocide." One of the many things I learned from this book is that the term is relatively young; in fact, it did not come into existence until after World War II, when a genocide survivor by the name of Raphael Lemkin introduced it into the English language. The story of Lemkin's life and his struggle to bring cases of genocide to the attention of American policymakers is one of the many inspiring, though frustrating, narratives in this book.
After a useful overview of what genocide actually means, Power methodically takes us through cases of genocide in the 20th century. She gives six examples: the Armenians in Turkey in the 1920s, the Holocaust, the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Iraqi oppression of the Kurds, the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. For each she makes a solid argument for why these atrocities should be considered genocide. She also gives a systematic analysis of how the U.S. responded, or in many cases didn't respond. She argues that it was not for lack of knowledge, nor for lack of ability, but rather for lack of political will that America delayed taking action or refused to take any action at all. In Cambodia, the wounds from Vietnam were too fresh to justify another South East Asian military intervention. In Iraq, our hopes of maintaining a strong opponent to Iran in the Middle East prevented us from taking a hard line against Saddam in the 1980s. In Rwanda, our failures in Somalia still haunted us. And of course the underlying theme in all of these cases was that policymakers in both the executive and legislative branches of government consistently fell back on their belief that preventing genocide in faraway places was not of interest to the American people, and therefore was not good politics.
Power is highly critical of U.S. policy, but to her credit she is critical consistently across the board. The book is non-partisan; she attacks the Reagan and Bush Administrations as much as she does the Clinton Administration. She also casts blame fairly evenly between the policymakers at the White House and State Department and the legislators in Congress. It is also important to note that she goes to great efforts to recognize those elected officials and career civil and foreign servants who went to great lengths to make the prevention of genocide a top foreign policy priority.

With the situation that is now happening in Darfur - Sudanese troops and militias are attacking indigenous tribes, killing men, women and children and burning their villages to the ground, while the United Nations dithers - this recent book has become timely again. "A Problem From Hell" is an angry but well-written book. The author, Samantha Power, was foreign correspondent who covered the war in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the Serbians sought to cleanse the countryside of its Moslem citizens, while the United Nations, the United States and NATO debated. This book was borne out of her anger and frustration at the "civilized world" and its inability to do something to stop genocide, an operation of ethnic cleansing that everyone knew was happening. Power has gone back to the Armenian Genocide, where more than a million Armenians perished at the hands of the Turks, inspired by how little had been said or done about the Armenian Genocide and Diaspora, Hitler and his minions set out to rid the continent of Jews. She also writes about the Pol Pot's Maoist massacre of his citizens, Hussein's gassing and murder of the Kurds. Power is frustrated by the inability of the United Nations and the United Nations to stop the murder. However, one of the difficulties is that the United Nations was designed to confront acts of aggression between countries, not the leaders of a sovereign nation eliminating it's own population. Additionally, the United States is made up with a vast number of nations, including the world's most despotic regimes and each nation has it's own agenda. Just overcoming the inertia of such a bureaucracy is a daunting prospect. So, I don't think the problem of genocide can or will be solved - when it is politically and militarily realistic to do so - by the United Nations. Unfortunately it will probably take unilateral action by the United States or a small coalition in order to do more than count the bodies and this doesn't sit well with the internationalists. Samantha Power's book shows that man's inhumanity to man is and will always be a persistent theme, but that someone has to take a lead at stopping the industrialized massacre of entire populations.

Samantha Powers' "A Problem From Hell" provides a detailed, very readable and very frightening account of genocides in the twentieth century. Ms. Powers provides more than a blow by blow account of horror. She recounts and analyzes the responses made to genocide by individuals and governments, primarily the US government. Ms. Powers presents us with two horrendous facts: the fact of the genocides themselves and the fact of those who stand idly by while genocide is commited. She condemns both. Put starkly, she shows a United States willing to fight to defend things outside its border but not people outside its border. We good and decent "realists" perceive our personal well-being to be dependent on things all over the world. We do not perceive our well-being to be dependent on the well-being of people all over the world. We did not perceive genocides of the Jews in Europe, of the Rwandans in Africa, the Armenians, Bosnians or Kurds in Europe and the Middle East or the Cambodians in Asia to threaten our well-being, unless and until that genocide threatened, as a kind of collateral damage, the things we believed we needed.
There are a few heroes: Raphael Lemkin, the people of Human Rights Watch and its predecessor organizations, the people of Amnesty International, Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, and a few State Department employees. These stories alone make the book worth reading. But there are no President heroes. Wilson ignored the Armenian genocide, Franklin Roosevelt turned away Jews fleeing the Nazis, Carter, Reagan and Bush I ignored the Kurdish, Bosnian and Cambodian genocides, and Clinton somehow missed the Rwandan genocide until he learned to "feel their pain." Indeed, indifference did not mark the limits of US policy. The US government supported Turkey, Iraq and the Pol Pot regime while they committed genocide. Reagan and Bush I did not bother to bother Saddam Hussein about his gassing of the Kurds when it happened, but now, for Bush II, it's a convenient ploy in his call for war against him.
Genocide simply has not been a central concern of the US government. When the US has acted, as it did in Bosnia and Kosovo, it has been forced to act, or acted out of embarassment.
Samantha Powers provides a clue as to why. The clue is in the language. When America's friend, ally and fellow freedom fighter, Saddam Hussein, was gassing his own citizens, Peter Galbraith, a staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, traveled to Iraq and saw what Hussein was doing to the Kurds. Despite his efforts, and the efforts of some Senators and Congress people, the US government went plodding along in its support of Saddam. Galbraith's boss reported that there was a "backlash" against him. "They would pooh-pooh him as `emotional.'" (Page 228) Powers also reports, re: Bosnia, that, "Most of the senior officials in the Bush (Bush I) administration, including ... Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney, ... and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, were traditional foreign policy "realists." The United States did not have the most powerful military in the history of the world in order to undertake squishy, humanitarian "social work."" (Page 261, my emphasis) Those who worked to stop the genocides, Powers writes, " were usually branded "emotional," "irrational," "soft," or "naive."" (Page 516)
"Emotional." "Irrational." "Squishy." "Soft." "Humanitarian." "Social work." Women's work.
Four hundred years B.C.E., Sophocles wrote "Antigone." In that play, Creon, the king, forbids the burying of his enemy, Polynices, on pain of death. But Polynices was Antigone's brother, and she buries him. Before sentencing her to her death, Creon screams, "Go down below and love, if love you must - love the dead! While I'm alive, no woman is going to lord it over me!" Burying the dead and protecting the living has been decreed by king and president to be "women's work." Antigone replied, "Your wisdon appealed to one world - mine, another." (Robert Fagles, "Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays" Penguin Classics 1982)
Who's work is it then that governments do, that the dead who need burying grow and grow?
What is left of a king or President or Secretary of State after he or she has sloughed off the emotional, the irrational, the squishy, the soft, the merely social?
Samantha Powers shows us some answers. Her book is riddled with such cardboard characters. The fragment of a human being that remains is - and I choose the words intending full irony - as helpless as a woman when confronted by these greatest of evils.

While this book was a difficult read, is was well researched and every argument fully supported by factual data. It really makes the reader comprehend what an impossible situation the United Stated is faced with in the age of genocide and what moral responsibility the US has in preventing genocide, if any. The book starts with the foundations of the term "genocide" and it many interpretations and then focuses on the major genocides in recent history, discussing the role of the US and what the US could have done or should have done to prevent the genocide. The reader is also left to ponder at what cost should the US intervene in international conflicts that have little or no bearing on US interests. This book is a must read for anyone interested in genocide and what role, if any, the US should take to prevent genocide from occurring, if prevention is even possible.

This work should rank among the best books ever written, considering the essential gravitas and relevance of subject matter (Genocide, historical examples, reasons & consequences, connection with terrorism, what could be done), depth and breadth of research, incisiveness and appropriateness of writing style, palpable force of the author's passion and intellect. Some have called this an `angry' work; others may not like it because it does not try to sugar coat the atrocities committed in the name of an ism, religion or political ideology.

Samantha Power focuses the world's attention on the greatest of all crimes-the mass murder of a targeted group of innocent civilians (by race or ethnicity), a crime which did not even have a name until Polish activist and attorney Raphael Lemkin invented the word Genocide about 60 years ago. Power's book succeeds in humanizing the otherwise dreadful subject matter by interspersing stories of unknown acts of heroism such as Senator Proxmire's 17 year attempt (over 3000 speeches often to an empty Senate floor) to ratify the genocide convention.

As many of the 5 star reviewers describe the contents of the book, I will only try to add some flavor to those comments. This book will inform, educate and provide insight into geopolitics in ways that few other books have attempted to do. It helps us to understand how history has been written by the victors, and why accurate accounts of history matter in the conduct of current and future policy and actions. It helps us to raise relevant questions for national and international debate, so that we may not gloss over the most pertinent questions of our age, simply because we do not believe it is in our `national interest' at a particular point in time.

If the purpose of education is to replace an empty mind with an open mind, this book belongs in every library in the world.

June, 1989. Samantha Power, just finished with her freshman year at Yale, is working at CBS in Atlanta, preparing sports footage for the news. It's a dream job; she loves sports. Then, on the "feed" --- live, unedited footage, broadcast only within the network --- she sees Chinese troops attack students in Tiananmen Square. It's the most shocking thing she's ever seen. And she thinks, "Oh, my God. What am I doing with my life?"

At Yale, she sharpens her focus, studying History and training herself to write. She graduates from Yale Law, gets a job at a foundation. But something nags at her, so she goes to Bosnia and becomes a correspondent. And, again, she is stunned. She sees the blood of slaughtered children, hears the accounts of the wholesale slaughter of Muslim men in football stadiums.

When Power returns home, she sees Holocaust memorials and remembrances and hears the talk of "never again." And she asks herself: "How can it be that the Bosnian Muslims differ from past victims of genocide, who presumably, somewhere along the line, must have been aided for us to say 'never again,' as if we meant it?"

She comes to a terrible conclusion: "It took about thirty seconds to realize that we had actually never aided the victims of genocide, never owned it as a foreign policy priority."

Which leads her to the ultimate question: "Why? Not only why does this happen, because all the time there are gaps between promise and practice, but what are the stories that we're telling ourselves so that we're living with this dissonance without experiencing it as dissonance?"

The answer is a giant of a book, so powerful and purposeful that it's like a home run rising as it clears the fence. "A Problem from Hell" won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book on U.S. foreign policy; for her New Yorker article on the horrors in Darfur, Power won the 2005 National Magazine Award for reporting. In a word, she's the world expert on genocide.

Power's findings will cheer no one: Americans lack the imagination to recognize evil. We don't want to believe that civilians are at risk in war zones. No one effectively pressures our politicians to do anything about genocide. To deaden our guilt, we note that atrocities occur on both sides, and we brand anyone who's really upset as "emotional." And "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference."

The proof comes in the form of stories, accounts of people who tried to stop genocide and how they fared. Power starts with the Turkish slaughter of Armenians. That's history, and no secret. Power's genius is to transition from these massacres to the story of Raphael Lemkin, a 21-year-old Polish Jew, who reads about one assassination in this campaign and wonders why, if it's a crime to kill one man, it isn't to kill a million. He becomes a lawyer, obsessed with the legal implications of slaughter. And then Hitler invades Poland.

His parents won't leave. Like others, they trust Hitler to be rational. Lemkin flees to Sweden, gets a position teaching international law at Duke and comes to America. Here, he starts a one-man crusade to alert President Roosevelt and his aides that the Germans are exterminating Jews. But no one can see what he does. Churchill notes, "We are in the presence of a crime without a name."

Lemkin begins to search for a single word that will convey the magnitude of these crimes. At length, he creates one --- genocide, partly from the Latin for "race" or "tribe" and partly from the Latin for "killing." A short word. Novel. Maybe, he hopes, unforgettable.

Lemkin works tirelessly to create international laws against genocide. In 1948, the United Nations adopts a human rights treaty. Reporters look for Lemkin, to tell the story of his 15-year struggle. They find him in the darkened assembly hall, weeping. "Let me sit here alone," he begs, overcome by the years of work and the memory of murdered relatives.

Lemkin's epic story had me --- and will have you --- in tears. But it's only the beginning. The word "holocaust" did not appear in The New York Times until 1959. The 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg, contained only a few references to Jews. "It was not really until the 1970s," Power writes, "that Americans became prepared to discuss the horrors."

By then, there were fresh horrors. Power has compelling narratives about all of them: Cambodia, Saddam's Iraq, Rwanda ("the fastest, most effective killing spree of the twentieth century"), Bosnia. No one comes off well. Fans of Bill Clinton will especially wince.

So what does "never again" really mean, Power asks. This: "Never again would Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s." But this is not to say that American policy failed. "The U.S. record is one of success," Power concludes, with dry bitterness. "Troubling though it is to acknowledge, U.S. officials worked the system and the system worked."

Could anything be different? Power quotes George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Power's stories are devastating, her research exhaustive. To read her is to become changed forever, to know too much, to be a candidate for "unreasonable." Consider yourself warned

Samantha Power would perfectly understand why, after reading her book, it's quite likely that we will come away with a pessimistic and somewhat fatalistic view. The thrust of her book's argument is that our government and leaders, through ignorance, denial, policy vacuum, or a lack of political will, have stood idly by and allowed crimes against humanity to take place. As we read the descriptions of the massacres she uses to make her point, we may believe that as citizens we are in a better position to express moral outrage. Power cuts right through this view and disabuses us of any right to stand on the moral high ground. In her recent interview about the book in "The Atlantic" she said "isolationism is not just ideological in this country, it is the way people live their lives. [We] live lives isolated from people abroad."
There are some exceptions of course and her book chronicles the stories of some of these advocates for the people or "screamers" as she calls them. Official inaction and paralysis spans the decades. The book goes back as far as 1915 when the Turks butchered about 1 million Armenians. The Holocaust comes next and then the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia, followed by Iraq's massacre of the Kurds, Rwanda, and Bosnia. There is a wealth of research involved based on recently declassified materials and numerous interviews with eyewitnesses and survivors. She is relentless with her facts and as decades passed and genocides continued and administration after administration protested that they didn't know, Power's steady spotlight on evidence to the contrary makes a lie out of so much of what we've been told publicly. There are many reasons; from the purely political "national interests" arguments, to the more subtle explanations that affected individual policy makers. For instance, when do you enter a conflict if it's your view that it's A PROBLEM FROM HELL? Warren Christopher supposedly made this comment about Bosnia. If you apply even the most basic management principles for resolving an issue - that of first "owning" the problem - it seems that many of our policy makers failed the grade. Power makes it clear that a huge amount of denial exists.
Power offers prescriptions for policy change and recommendations for preventing genocides and they don't all involve military action. She is also very much aware of how September 11th has changed US foreign policy priorities. Nevertheless we have both the moral authority and the neccessary resources to prevent genocides and Power says that "the one lesson from the last half century is that if it's not the U.S.'s problem, it's nobody's problem." This book is a compelling argument for the truth of that statement but it's less than optimistic tone still leaves us wondering, will anything change?

As I was finishing this book, one thought that crossed my mind was that Ms. Power's family should be proud of her. To have done the necessary research and then, more importantly, to have written the story of genocide in the last century, to have faced down what must have been periodic visions of horror and gone on, is a feat most of us can only imagine. Ms. Power stands out as one of the heroes who are rarely recognized. I was pleased to note her special tribute to her parents after I had this thought.
The book takes us from the Armenian massacres in 1915 through the Bosnian Serb massacres of Muslims in the 1990s, describing how each situation developed, how it was viewed by the world, what was done about the atrocities. There are hard facts, stories of bad decisions, details of massacres, rape, and destruction. What might otherwise have become a dry (yet horrifying) history book is lifted and made personal by the author's restrained yet compassionate style, and by her inclusion of the stories of the many individuals who worked to stop genocide over the years.
The focus of the book is on the response of the United States to repeated instances of genocide in different parts of the world, and that response in the 20th century was consistent. The United States did nothing to stop genocide unless it was in our national interest to do so. And it rarely is.
Oddly, although I feel shame and disgust with our leaders for choosing to do nothing in the face of indisputable information on massive slaughter, I also feel hope. Throughout the years a few people have stood up, have braved ridicule, loss of life, loss of careers, even loss of their mental stability, to speak for the invisible, the victims. These few individuals rose like bubbles to the surface again and again, were forced down and rose up, would not let go. It is because such persons have arisen, often from unlikely places, that I hold out hope for our future.
I also take hope, although it may be premature, in the maturing of our society and its government. The analysis in this extraordinary work of the way decisions were made also suggests that there are alternatives. It is clear that when we have 1) no mandate for protecting innocent persons from slaughter and 2) no plan for dealing with genocidal regimes that we are going to be caught in a bind again and again, continually applying the lessons of "the last war" to the present one, and almost always choosing the wrong course.
Our government relies heavily on public pressure and when that pressure doesn't materialize primarily because the public does not know what's going on, decisions are made that do not reflect the feelings of the majority of Americans. Again and again I read that "the public doesn't care because [the country] is too far away". We do care. We care when we know. There is now a far simpler solution to filling this gap than there has been in the past: the Internet. I have high hopes for its use to provide accurate information and gather support for actions against future Milosevics.
The book is long and the information in it well-documented. There are 620 pages in the soft-cover edition, including a 17-page index and 80 pages of notes. Power used not only the extensive printed sources listed, but interviewed hundreds of persons. The result is readable, compelling, and for me difficult to put down.

Time and again, politicians vow "never again" will they allow genocide to occur. Yet, despite ample opportunities to back up these claims with action, the global community has done precious little.

Beginning with the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks to Pol Pot's reign of terror in Cambodia to Hussein's gassing of Iraq's Kurds (the first incidence of a leader using chemical weapons to suppress his OWN people) to Milosovic's slaughter of Bosnian Muslims (and Croatians) to the horrific abuses against the Tutsi by Hutu aggressors in Rwanda, Power highlights the frustrating and--oftentimes incomprehensible--responses that the United States, the EU, and UN have pursued.

For instance, even as Saddam was wiping out the Kurds in Northern Iraq and using chemical weapons against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war, the United States continued to supply Saddam with intelligence, trade credits that allowed him to import U.S. agricultural goods, and weapons. Our decisions were rooted in "national interests" which dictated that the United States could not allow Iran to enlarge its presence in the Middle East. (It should also be noted that the U.S. was not alone in supporting Saddam in this war as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Kuwait, all provided succor to the tyrant).

Indeed, our entrenched commercial interests--the United States was the largest importer of Iraqi oil and Iraq was one of the largest consumers of U.S. agricultural products like Arkansas rice-- prevented us from adequately responding to Iraq's genocide. Eventually we established safe zone in Northern Iraq but that, Power argues, was mostly due to complaints from U.S. ally Turkey about a refugee crisis as Iraq's exiled Kurds fled to their Northern neighbor.

National interests also governed our response to the Khmer Rouge atrocities. After nearly three years of genocide, we supported the regime in an attempt to curry favor with China--an ally of Cambodia at the time--and drive a wedge between China and the Soviet Union. Our narrow interpretation of national interests also played a role in our inaction over Rwanda and Bosnia.

Bosnia was especially disturbing given that the United States refused to lift an arms embargo against Muslims, which prevented them from defending themselves against Serbian attacks. This led the Bosnian Muslims to seek the help of Muslim extremists in the region including Al-Queda. Perhaps this didn't register as a national security issue because the United States could not appreciate the threats posed by non-state actors, choosing instead to focus on nation states. This is still no excuse for inaction or inadequate action.

Although Power is critical of the United States, she is equally concerned with the ineptitude of the UN and apathy of the EU, who seemed to do very little in response to genocide happening in its own "backyard".

Power is also very careful in casting U.S. policy responses in the proper context before she draws her conclusions. For instance, during the Cambodian genocide, Power discusses how the U.S. was reeling in the wake of the Vietnam war as public sentiment had sharply turned away from politicians whom they no longer trusted. Nevertheless, Power believes that President Ford and later Jimmy Carter, should have at least denounced the Khmer Rouge publicly. Perhaps the U.S. Presidents could have initiated a vote on the UN to strip the Khmer Rouge of any representation in the delegation.

Myopic interpretations of national interests aside, politicians are loathe to respond to genocide for two other reasons. One is the belief that U.S. voters would never support U.S. involvement in international conflicts. Yet, as Bob Dole demonstrated in his aggressive lobbying for the U.S. Congress to respond to the Bosnian conflict, public support can be cultivated once politicians inform them.

The second impediment to acting is the false choice between committing U.S. troops and doing nothing (or doing little). Indeed, very few policies seem to exist along this continuum for U.S. policymakers and because voters are sensitive to U.S. casualties, the country is reluctant to deploy troops. The result is that the U.S. invariably sides with the latter policy, choosing to view dictators as rational actors who can be wooed by incentives. This has played to disastrous results, and is tantamount to doing nothing.

Yet, as Power demonstrates, small actions can go a long way. For instance, in Rwanda, Hutu militias spared the lives of Tutsi refugees who had fled to a hotel simply because a U.S. diplomat made repeated calls to the hotel manager requesting updates on the status of the refugees. Conversely, dictators such as Milosovic and Saddam were emboldened by the tepid response to their atrocities and redoubled their efforts to exterminate Muslims and Kurds.

This book is anything but a polemic. Instead, Power has provided a balanced, well reasoned book that will force readers to question the way our politicians perceive our country's "national interest."

One of those books that stays with you. It impresses upon you that evil is still rampant in the world and the critical need for all to be vigilant to its embryogenesis in apathy towards those among us without a voice.

and yet I savored every well -structured, lucid chapter of this mind expanding book. The writing was succinct and convincing enough to have me frequently flipping forward to the appendix of detailed references and notes. It is not too often that I stumble on an argument which is tight enough to make me actually change the way I think. After reading this, I do not think less of the US. If anything, I expect more, much more. It provides a clear detailed retrospective analysis, and then compels the reader to keep a sharper , more objective eye out for certain sentinel events that may arrive in tomorrows newspaper. While the US is frequently the focus of discussion, the book says something about each one of us, and our unlimited potential for participating in both the stunningly honorable and unspeakably horrific. I left with the feeling that ALOT of people died so that we would read this book.

Samantha Power has produced a history of genocide through the 20th century. She presents an impressive accounts of genocide against Armenians in Turkey, Jews in Holocaust, Tutsi in Rwanda, Kurds in Iraq, and Bosnian Muslims in the Balkan war; the stories are extremely well-written, and the images are vivid. Apart from stories about the conflicts themselves, she gives credit to the individuals who contributed to political understanding of genocide and recognition of the term in international law. She puts heavy emphasis on the role of the United States in dealing with genocide, mostly taking the critical stance.

The book is remarkably unbiased, as a great piece of journalist prose. Samantha Power spent several years in Bosnia as a reporter for the Western magazines, and her writing style evolved to reflect vivid images while passing information and truth to her reader. She is not judging the culprits of genocide, including a chapter about the war tribunals instead. That leaves the reader with an option of making one's own choices in thinking about genocide.

The book is a great source of information on genocide, foreign policy of the United States, and the role of individuals in dealing with the "problems from hell." Simply brilliant reading and definitely worth your time!

The current issue of NYRB contains an essay by Samantha Power distilled from the book. The book is mentioned about half-way through the text and based on the quality of the essay I was convinced to buy the book. Now, half-way through the book, which is excellent, I am on the hunt for more information about the hero of the Problem from Hell, Raphael Lemkin. His story is the conscience of the little we have done as a nation to sustain international human rights and prevent the state from destroying its own or those of another state. This part of the book that describes Lemkin and his relentless effort is one of the most moving and uplifting statements I have ever read. It sets an unparalled example of committment to an idea that is the best part of human nature. The commentary on the United States failure to accept the idea and make it an integral part of foreign policy applies to all of us: citizens and leaders alike. I have reason to doubt my own moral fortitude, but not that of the author who has laid before us a legal brief that documents a deliberate policy of inaction by our country. The arguement of political reality or political expediency is a dark cloak spread to cover greed, indifference and lack of political will. Hopefully, we can correct this course and not be a future accomplice to genocide.

Others have indicated that this is a 'tough read' but I didn't find Samantha Power's language tough at all - just the subject matter. I'm sure our government would prefer that this book gets relegated to remainder status very quickly because they would prefer it that Americans remain blissfully ignorant of the world around them. This gives them the luxury of intervening only in situations where our economic interests are threatened while ignoring the mass slaughter of civilians. As Ms. Powers painfully documents in case after case, it is apparent that the U.S. attitude is, 'Why intervene if there's nothing in it for us?' Morality and 'the right thing to do' apparently do not fit into the equation. Our 'successful' strategy in the face of genocide seems to have been simply to keep the debate going long enough over the semantics of the word 'genocide' until the problem has passed or there is no one left alive. As I read with disgust our country's shameful non-response to genocide in the twentieth century, I couldn't help thinking what message this sends to any future unsavory regimes around the world contemplating a little 'ethnic cleansing' within their borders. Do yourself a favor and buy this brilliant book, read it, and share it with others.

Power tells the story of America's involvement in the genocides of the twentieth century, starting with the Armenian one in 1915 and ending with the ones in the former Yugoslavia. Great reading if you want to find out why America talks a good game but doesn't really act on it; if you want to understand how the UN Genocide Convention came to be; if you want to know how easy it would be to have an impact on some of those genocides, if we could just convince the politicians to care (just convince them we care enough to affect their re-election chances).

It should be the easiest subject to have universal agreement on; Genocide is reprehensible and cannot be defended. The reality is of course much different for our species is the only one that kills, tortures, and maims its members without cause. Differences in religion, the desire to control land, natural resources, or hunger for power are not reasons to kill entire groups. The title of the book is, "A Problem From Hell", and it is an outstanding work by Samantha Power. She is not only a competent historian she spent years in the midst of one of the more recent examples of what could also be called, a problem of human nature. This Nation's Congress took 40 years to ratify the treaty on Genocide. It seems some Southern Congressmen were worried about culpability from Jim Crow that was still alive and well, others for the millions of Native Americans slaughtered because they were in our way.
She specifically covers the massacre of Armenians by Turkey, Hitler's murder of the Jews, Pol Pot's slaughter of Cambodians, Saddam Hussein gassing minorities in Iraq, the 1994 murder of 800,000 people in Rwanda, and most recently the Serb Nationalist's bid to join the roster of those who kill almost for sport. The mass killing is not sport however the individual conduct of the sadists who enjoy inventive killing is hard to read.
In 1915 The United States was not in a position to impose on Turkey. It is now 2002 and The United States deems Turkey an ally, a country that has refused to admit any Genocide took place. The United States has a congress that killed a vote condemning the Turkish Government because hours before the vote President Clinton, a lame duck President asked them too. It is a sad commentary that our congress lacks the moral fiber of men like Henry Morgenthau our Ambassador to Turkey while they were killing, a man who was denouncing what he called, "Race Murder", while trying to gain the attention of his government.
The Holocaust is well documented and some of the participants were punished, but it and Armenia are events that are 50 and 100 years old, and blurred by time. They are still better remembered than millions of Native Americans slaughtered, and millions, who were bought, sold, enslaved, and murdered because they were black.
In the 1970's 2,000,000 were killed in Cambodia, the 1980's brought Saddam Hussein and his slaughter of The Kurds, and then in 1994, the world watched Rwanda, 800,00 dead, and then the former Yugoslavia, they are still counting the missing. In 2001 on September 11th on a comparably small scale we experienced the murder of our citizens only because they were Americans.
Largely because of what was Yugoslavia a new international treaty was created to establish a body to constantly deal with the crimes discussed. The treaty requires 60 nations ratify the document for it to become reality. When this book was written 43 had signed, about 10 days ago 66 was reached. The United States is not a party to this effort.
When I started this book it was easy to deal with U.S. conduct simplistically. At the end of the book the same issues became very gray. As the world stands today any intervention will require The United States. This has nothing to do with misplaced national pride it's reality. We had Special Forces in Afghanistan 48 hours after The World Trade Center was hit. We can monitor any piece of ground on the planet with either satellites, manned or unmanned aircraft capable of real time intelligence gathering within hours of deciding to deploy them. Our military is without peer in both individual capability and technological superiority. So what should we do?
The Rwandan Genocide took place in approximately 100 days, 8,000 murdered per day. The only effective response would have been a unilateral move by The United States into Rwanda. The United Nations would take 100 days to agree on the shape of the table to meet at. What would be our reason for violating another sovereign nation? Genocide seems to be a very good reason. But now back to reality. How many confirmed deaths justify military intervention, what threshold needs to be met for our country to commit forces and lose lives of our soldiers? And it may be unpopular to state but there needs to be more than philosophical outrage to act. What is Rwanda to The U.S.? The reality is virtually nothing. Iraq threatened our economy intervention was an easy call. A U.N. sanctioned operation; it took 5 months to start, had severe limitations, and left Iraq a viable threat.
The conclusion I came to after reading and thinking about the book is that the closest one can get to a stated policy would be something like what follows. The United States decides that we are going to be the world's police force. No other country can do it, so we will. Economic sanctions will be forced upon the offending country to pay the bill, because the citizenry of this nation will not. This will necessitate our not being involved in any treaty that exposes us to any liability or sanction other than those we place on ourselves. The other extreme is we act only when it is in the interest of our country to do so The Rwandas of the world are ignored, and we protect our interests or punish those responsible for September 11th like attacks.
I enjoyed this book, and I share the author's anger and frustration. There is no record on effective international cooperation, and there is no way The United States will become a police force. It is true a Serb official killed himself 2 weeks ago to avoid being deported and tried, and the Dutch Government resigned last week over their inaction during Srebrenica. Neither action saved a single life.
Genocide will stop when humans evolve further, not before.

Ms. Power does not preach. She shines a bright light into the dark corners where inhumanity flourishes. No one wants to read about genocide because it upsets our sensibility and the false image we carry around in our heads about our supposed love and tolerance for one another. But in spite of what the politicians say, genocide continues to be a defining feature of modern life. This book should be read by everyone concerned about where we are now and where we are headed. It is scrupulously researched and very well written. I have never seen anything that comes even close to it on this important if depressing subject. Buy it and read it. You will be a better person for the effort.

The documentary "An Unreasonable Man" uses a George Bernard Shaw quotation to highlight the social importance and relevance of Ralph Nader (the consumer advocate hero who found himself person non grata after liberals blamed him for splitting the vote, and permitting George W. Bush to win the presidency in 2000): "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

This quotation is how Samantha Power ends "A Problem from Hell," her study of genocide. The unreasonable man that she reveres in this book is Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer and linguist (he coined the term "genocide") who made it his single-minded unreasonable life-long quest to get nations to ratify an international genocide ban. For decades, always wary of "internationalism," the United States refused to ratify the ban, and ironically it was Ronald Reagan -- hardly the "internationalist" -- who would push through ratification, and, ironically, he did so in order to appease the Jewish lobby after gravely offending it by visiting a Nazi cemetery in Germany.

The book "A Problem from Hell" is in fact full of ironies, contradictions, and farces. The Khmer Rouge was committing systemic genocide against its own people, and the United States closed its eyes, because it didn't want to offend the Khmer Rouge's Chinese patrons. The Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and stopped the genocide, and instead of praising Vietnam the United States, again in deference to the Chinese, protested vehemently.

If you see the world through the eyes of Samantha Powers -- that genocide is the greatest evil, and it must be stopped at all costs -- then the international system is a farce. But if you're a national leader, and you're balancing realpolitik with the the economic concerns of your people then you're likely to think that the single-minded obsession of an over-educated, self-indulging global elite with "genocide" (a complex, undefinable term) then you may think that a bigger farce. Moreover, as Jared Diamond has explained in "Collapse," genocide is often not driven by just ethnic hatred, but by a serious life-threatening scarcity of resources. If there just isn't enough food to go around and someone needs to be killed, then it's going to be the "other."

In a perfect world, there would be genocide and there would be no war. There would be hatred and there would be unreasonableness. Unfortunately, the world is what it is.

Despite my concern with the author's single-mindedness, I do think "A Problem from Hell" is definitely worthy of the Pulitzer Prize. It's well-written, and it's impressively researched -- a sort of detailed, meticulous research that can only come from a single-minded obsession with the subject.

In "A Problem from Hell" Ms. Power documents the history of genocide as it is presently understood and argues for an end to non-intervention when dealing with this horrific act. The formation of the modern definition of genocide is chronicled in the first few chapters, she documents the extraordinary efforts of Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer and Jewish refugee from Nazi occupied Poland, to get genocide, a word he first coined to describe the Ottoman slaughter of Armenians, declared an international crime. Then Ms. Power moves on to gripping journalistic accounts of the many genocides (though many were never declared so) of the twentieth century; she argues that most if not all could have been either prevented or stopped quickly if western nations, specifically America, were more forceful and faster in their response. The policies that she lays out are Wilsonian in nature and, in my opinion to broadly applied, however, many would have undoubtedly worked (i.e. cutting off military aid to Saddam's Iraq in 1989).

In the end, Ms. Power's book is a must read that informs one of the true nature of genocide, moreover, it also outline possible solutions to future genocides. Still, these opinions are separate enough that, so long as one reads with awareness of them, its quite easy to ensure they stay suggestions and do not transmute into facts once in one's head. The main problem is the book's tremendous length and depth -- definitely not a book for those looking for a simple overview -- but if one desires a thorough as well as relatively concise history of genocide this is the book.

The venom that spews from Turkish denialist of the Armenian Genocide is only a testament to the truthfulness of this scholarly study. There is currently a major campaign of denial in Turkish American circles. I am using the Armenian Genocide as an example of how the truth often sets us free but is fought with the utmost visceral resistance by those who perpetrate such crimes against humanity. The best things the Turkish Government can do for it's human rights record is to come clean. Accept the atrocities that the Ottomans committed - what a better way to teach Turkish Children right from wrong!
Let's keep the memory of all who died in all crimes against humanity alive. Read this book at the very least for that reason and to prevent such evil from ever happening again.

The problem with this book is that the author completely overlooks the culpability of the U.S. in the acts of genocide discussed. The U.S.bombing of Cambodia although not in itself an act of genocide was the reason why peasants flocked to the Khmer Rouge who previously were a marginal group. It was the U.S. who blocked any attempts of the UN to send more soldiers to Rawanda. As well, it was the U.S. that armed Indonesia so that they could attack and occupy East Timor, a clear case of Genocide. etc. etc. etc.

A superb writing of atrocities of modern man. It gives the reader a sense of where modern day democracy lies, and where imperialism ends.
All events depicted happened; there is no denying them; although there are many people who try (even on this message board). There are too many artifacts and documents depicting the events mentioned to feel or state otherwise.
The author does an excellent job at giving a descriptive discussion of these events. This book is a true example of the fact that modern day genocides will always have a voice in culture, just as the spirits who suffered will always be heard.

I've never written a review before, but after reading the one star comment of another reader, I felt compelled to respond with a review of my own. To say this is an enjoyable book would be a stretch--- When the subject matter is Genocide, you should not expect a fast, easy, light read. However, I found this book to be extremely compelling and informative. As a teacher of world history, I have frequently taught high school students about the Holocaust. The most common consensus of the students seems to be "that was then-- this could never happen again today..." This book shows that not only has genocide happened, but it continues to happen. I don't know the answers. I am not sure if the cause is a lack of political will, willfull ignorance of the suffering of others, or this generations' desensitization of violence. I don't think this book gives answers as much as it asks questions and informs readers. Far from trivializing the Holocaust and other genocides, this powerful book introduces readers to attrocities that they should be aware of, but probably are not.

Samantha Power has done a wonderful job at researching events that few of today's youth have ever heard of, but certainly should know. Extremely well written, this book offers both the specifics and the historical context of some of the century's most heinous crimes.
Although I don't agree with the position that the author seems to promote throughout the book, that the United States should immediately jump into the fray when any crimes of this nature begin, I do think it's a viewpoint worth considering. There are many times in history demonstrated quite thoroughly in this book that we stood by and did nothing for too long. We can't stop all atrocities, but this book argues that we can do a lot more than we have so far.
I found this a truly fascinating evaluation of several important events that put even today's international conflicts into better perspective. It's a long book, but worth every page.

"A Problem from Hell" is a straightforward condemnation of the US government for inadequately dealing with instances of twentieth century genocide in Armenia, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo. It is a passionately written and often suffers from an intemperate advocacy that doesn't seriously consider any counter-argument.
The legal history of genocide is first reviewed, concentrating on the work of Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who defined the word. Implicit throughout that which follows is Lemkin's principle that the United States (or any other capable nation) has not only the right but the responsibility to interfere when genocide occurs. Power argues that in every historical instance, the US government did in fact recognize genocide (even if it didn't admit as much) and refused to react adequately, if at all. However, her reliance on international treaties and easy moral outrage makes for a rather weak case, for two reasons.
First, the strongly interventionist position is advocated without any serious consideration of the costs. Although she asserts that diplomatic and economic pressures might be effective, it is conceded that most cases would require military force and the deployment of ground troops. At the very least this would lead to American deaths, and in some cases carries that danger of a wider war. Such concerns are generally dismissed as a "realist" stance which needn't be a concern in the face of genocide, although it is acknowledged that NATO intervention in Kosovo has had "mixed" results.
The book's second and greater weakness is to place the blame for immoral inaction on top State Department officials and, ultimately, presidential administrations without addressing the public opinions by which they are constrained. The Clinton administration, for example, is faulted for not following through on a promise to act in Bosnia, without noting that this relatively minor (and narrowly targeted) campaign promise would become a major issue if substantial military force later became necessary. Likewise, interventionist State Department officers are depicted as victims of their timid superiors without much explanation of the constraints of public opinion when, in fact, a strong interventionist policy could only have followed if there had been public support. Power's indictment of presidential administrations should really be explicitly extended to the voters who put these folks in power, people who aren't terribly interested in assuming the responsibilities of an international SWAT team.

I'm copying my review from goodreads over. It includes ideology based on the book so for anyone that is hoping for a book report, you will be a bit disappointed.

Before that I should note that for anyone that has not read this book and wonders what the majority of the negative reviews are talking about - the book begins with a brief commentary on the genocide that took place in Turkey - which the Turkish government continues to get up in arms over whenever it is branded as genocide - hence the reviewers are singling out that one section and ignoring the bulk of the book because it questions something they are obviously in denial over.

thoughts on the book:

After owning this book for nearly 9 years I was able to finish it. I had attempted to read this book no less than three times prior only to get bogged down in the depressing nature and overall frustration wrought with the "system". It's hard to recommend this book to others because it is so painstaking to read but at the same time the images of the events, the reactions of the supporters and dissenters toward action, and the results of action and-more commonly-inaction is so powerful that it would benefit every single human being to read it. It is extremely well written and amazingly researched.

In every case of genocide in the 20th century there is no one reason why more often than not apathy was chosen over action. It was not a conservative or liberal agenda that prevented intervention as can be exemplified by Bob Dole pushing for US persons out stating "I don't think we have any national interest there. The Americans are out, and as far as I'm concerned, in Rwanda, that out to be end end of it." (more than 700,000 civilians were slaughtered AFTER that was stated) yet in the event of Srebrenica and Kosovo, Dole was one of the key protagonists for action to stop the genocide of the Muslim population by the Christian Serbs.

I think the crux of the issue Samantha Power raised with this book was that everyone, liberal and conservative, diplomacy, national interests, or military intervention oriented, from those dedicated to the military machine to those determined to see a world without guns - all have to drastically redirect their vision in the face of genocide. It is not a problem that goes away with inaction, it is not a problem that can often be fixed by lobbing ordinance at the perpetrators; it requires a consolidated effort of worldwide influence, often including military intervention consisting of troops on the ground and the acceptance that if we truly want to protect the lives of innocents, we have to be willing to risk our own.

We cannot continue the notion, as one state department official speculated when intervention in Rwanda was being mulled over, that one American casualty in the effort to stop genocide was only worth every 85,000 dead civilians in a country that we had no national interest in. Most importantly, we, as a world that stated over five decades ago that "never again" would we allow genocide to take place, have to start listening to the witnesses of such events when they first raise their concerns - as Power states in her conclusion "They were usually branded 'emotional,' 'irrational,' 'soft,' or 'naive.' Many of them saw their careers destroyed by the stands they took...how many of us who look back at the genocides of the twentieth century, including the Holocaust, do not believe that these people were right? How many of us do not believe that the presidents, senators, bureaucrats, journalists, and ordinary citizens who did nothing, choosing to look away rather than face hard choices and wrenching moral dilemmas, were wrong? How can it be that those who fight on behalf of these principles are the ones deemed unreasonable?"

A Problem from Hell, written by Samantha Power, delves deep into the flesh of American History. Touching on the many problems in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo, Power takes these issues and discusses what America did, or the lack of action, and what the American public has not been aware of. What I found fascinating about this book was not only the hard and stunning facts, yet also Samantha Power's explanation of genocide, and further, what she feels America should do in the future. Her ideas resonated with our current situation in Iraq, and after reading this book it made me think about our place in that situation. Our country has repeated the same mistakes over and over again, and through the many situations where we should have learned our lessons, we have just ignored other calls for help. The quote at the beginning of the book, by Abraham Lincoln, sums up her ideas, "We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility." Abraham Lincoln knew that with a powerfully growing nation, what comes hand in hand with this power is responsibility. The US has not taken this responsibility, yet when were hit with the devastating loss of citizens in the World Trade Center attack, many countries came to our aid and supported us in our loss, yet when other countries are hit even harder, we sit at the sidelines. This book is riveting and brutally honest, and will open anyone's eyes to the atrocities that our country has committed.

In "A Problem From Hell", Samantha Power makes an ambitious attempt to analyze a century of Genocide, beginning with the 1915 Genocide of Armenians by the Turks, and ending with the still all-too-recent horrors in Kosovo. She finds the usual suspects, in the form of ruthless dictators and hate-mongers who cynically deny any wrongdoing even as mass graves are dug up, and western politicians who hold the scales of justice in their hands (in the form of modern military forces) but who find their own precious political careers weightier than the lives of thousands--or even millions--of people "over there". She also finds a few unusual heroes, particularly a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin with a habit of accosting high goverment officials as they stroll the halls of Congress.
I must give Ms. Power credit for avoiding some of the knee-jerk anti-war attitudes of the contemporary left. No shrinking violet, she clearly advocates the position that it is acceptable--even an imperative--to go to war when the moral cause is compelling. Nor is she in principle averse to using the tools of retail politics. If a western coutry can muster selfish reasons to act on behalf of a moral cause, so much the better.
She falters, however, by not showing how a western politician can make such a decision more palatable to his or her constituents. She musters a powerful argument for the moral need to stop genocide, and to pay a price in blood and treasure to do so, but this is of little practical value in the post-Nazi, post-civil rights era when every politician pays lip service to ending genocide. As such, I am afraid this book must be viewed as merely one of the best in a long series of books whose only real value is to preach to activists for whom genocide is already an overriding concern. Despite an earnest effort, Samantha Power has failed to bridge the gap between activists, and those western leaders who have the muscle to stop genocide, but who also have quite a bit else on their minds.

Liberals bash politicians whenever they suggest military action of any sort, then they bash politicians when no intervention occurs and genocide takes place.
While this book may have been admirable as a history of genocide, it does not serve as any sort of political literature for me. We may be powerful, but this does not make us the world's policeman. (If we did act as the world's policeman, we'd be accused of being a "bully" as well, by the way.)
Taking part in each regional conflict would unnecessarily get us involved in other's affairs, costing countless American lives--and not making us any more popular in the eyes of the world, either. In addition, we may be powerful, but we don't have enough resources to fight off multiple dictatorships, terrorists, etc. etc. We have enough of a problem now fighting al-Qaida.
America getting involved in outside disputes may also put us in peril for a World War III, because our presence is so powerful, other large nations are sure to join in.
As I said, this book is great on documentation but weak politically. America HAS done a lot to stave off genocide. First, by just being an example of democracy for other nations to follow. We've also donated a whole lot of aid, both monetarily and in food, to starving peoples. Our involvement in some wars have also alleviated the suffering of countless millions. Think back to the concentration camps liberated by American troops. Think back to the mass graves Americans found in Iraq after freeing Iraqis from oppression under Saddam. Sorry America bashers.
As a minority, maybe I have a different perspective. But from my family's experiences in the Old World to my own experiences in the New, I wouldn't trade this life for anything. America is a beacon of hope to those suffering, and has greatly improved the lives of those living in poverty or under harsh governments for a long time.

I found this book incredibly insightful. The book is a thoughtful narration on why genocide is difficult to confront. From the United States perspective, the author explains why time after time, among different administrations, liberal or conservative, leaders and common folk choose to ignore genocide. What does anyone personally have to gain from stopping genocide? Very little and requires tremendous sacrifice. The subject matter is not easy to read but the author skillfully tells personal stories to make this a compelling and dramatic read. I highly recommend this book.

Samantha Power takes history to a new level. She has boldly gone where so few were too afraid to go. I've never read a more compelling account of post World War 2 atrocities. It saddens me that through all the work and time put into making genocide a crime that the United States was the last to ratify the genocide convention.
Needless to say I was aggravated to the point of almost putting the book down. However, Ms. Power wrote a piece of literature so informative and unknown to me that I kept reading. I learned more about the history of genocide than I have in four years of high school.
I gave A Problem from Hell four stars because it was such a griping historical analysis of genocide and how the world handled it, but it was a tad too long .

Samantha Power writes in her book about the Armenian Genocides but excludes the Greek, Assyrian and other ethnic minorities of Asia Minor (which is now Turkey). Regardless, her book is praiseworthy.
For the record, In 1922, Mustafa Kemal along with his regular troops and his "chettes" (non-regular troops) made his promise of "Turkey for the Turks" a reality -- by burning down the City of Smyrna and its Christian inhabitants.
end.

Ms. Powers writes an excellent book. "A Problem From Hell" chronicles of the worst human rights atrocities in the world since the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand she goes into great depth on some atrocities and completely skips others; such as East Timor. The first half of the book is clearly a definitive history of genocide including Raphael Lemkin and the formations of the United Nations and the genocide convention. Then the second half dives head first into the Cambodian, Rwandan, and Yugoslavian genocides. While this book is critical of US foreign policy on international human rights, she does surmise that it may have been "the best" policy at the time; tragically as it was. This is an excellent book on the history of human rights protections. Her introduction lays out all of her main points and ideas very clearly so there isn't any guess work or trying to find the point. Definitely worth the read.

A Problem from Hell gives an indepth historic account of America's role (or lack thereof) in preventing, halting, and punishing genocide in the twentieth century. Well researched, Power brings to light many previously unknown or little known facts and issues in America's foreign policy decisions regarding genocide. This is an area in which America's responses have been severely lacking, and this book truly demonstrates this. Power's style of writing makes for enjoyable read (as much as a book on genocide can be). Highly informative, this will get your blood flowing.

"A Problem From Hell" is what Secretary of State Warren Christopher called the Bosnia war. After the author, Samantha Power, reported on that war, she studied the beginnings and ends of some other major genocides of the 20th century. This book is her report, and it is stunning, not as an indictment of anyone, but as a revelation to us all.
First, the beginning: Genocide begins with the policy choice of a man in command of a sovereign state to achieve state aims by killing pre-identified citizens. The book details the policies of the Young Turk Mehmed Talaat Pasha, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Colonel Bagosora, and Slobodan Milosevic.
Second, the end: Genocide cannot be prevented or ended from the outside if respect of national sovereignty trumps other values, which it usually does. Even if international effort or an invasion from the outside runs over national sovereignty, genocide is unlikely to be stopped unless the suffering is personally witnessed. Genocide stops when individuals who MUST fight evil act to end it. The book tells the uplifting story of a number of heroic individuals who became political Good Samaritans to help the victims of genocide. The first of these was Raphael Lemkin, who coined the work "genocide." Read the book to find out who the others are -- you will be pleased and surprised to learn of the actions of some very selfless Americans.
This book was the parable of the Good Samaritan writ large. Most of us choose to walk by on the other side of the road when the thief attacks the victim, the better not to see the victim's terror and suffering. This book should jolt us out of that habit, and if you opposed our invasion of Iraq, you might find solace in knowing that we deposed a perpetrator of genocide.

Samantha Power has written a book about how the US government utterly failed to intervene during numerous occasions of genocide in the last century. Her outline of how the UN definition and legal treatment of genocide came to be formulated is beautifully clear - the hero of this book is Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish refugee lawyer whose dedication to the cause of outlawing genocide made it into an international crime in the first place.
However, Power's perspective on the whole subject is bizarrely naive. I speak as somebody whose formal education ended at the equivalent of high school, but I find it difficult to understand how someone so educated and qualified as Power (she teaches human rights and US foreign policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy school of government) could be so weirdly starry-eyed as to apparently believe that it's a scandal that US foreign policy regarding genocide has generally been guided by other than altruistic motives.
I mean, maybe I'm too cynical, but what does she think governments are for? Her research seems respectable, but her premise (which, by inference, I take to be that the US government generally wants the best for everyone) is at best debatable, and her overall tone of shocked outrage betrays a sensibility more suited to an ignorant but idealistic teenager, rather than an angry but well-informed expert. (I notice, also, that the general thrust of this book is to condemn the US government for conflicts it didn't get involved in at all. When the US actually gave financial and material support to ethnic violence, as in the cases of East Timor and Palestine, Power is either silent - there isn't a single reference in this book to Israeli policy towards the Palestinians - or else cursory; US support for the genocidal policies of Indonesia towards East Timor is referred to once, on pages 146-147 in the British edition, and then forgotten.)
In the end, this book can be useful in that certain facts are grouped together under the one cover. But Power's commentary, her sad-eyed indignation that no more was done, is so utterly jejeune that she shoots herself in the foot. Any state that acts out of what it claims to be morality should be mistrusted. The evisceration of the UN, carried out with such efficiency and brutality by the US and its clients, should have been Power's subject. But she is either too naive or too disingenuous to say so. How this book got a Pulitzer is beyond me, unless the Pulitzer standards have dropped lately.

I purchased ''A problem from hell'' in March and took me almost a month to finsh. But it was really worth it! Samantha Power walks us through the major genocides that happened in the past century. From the Killing fields in Cambodia(1975-1979)to the Killing fields in Rwanda(1994),she writes about America's responce to genocides and truth be told, we are inveloped in national self-intrest.She also examines of how the word genocide came to be and the creation of the genocide convention. For anyone who is interrested in foreign policy and human rights (as I am) this book is a must read!!!

We always like to think about the matters in this book as some experience happening so far away from home that it is only mere anecdotic. But after finish reading this compelling book I keep wondering myself, how can you sit down down there and do nothing about it? Power does have a point and she is an excellent writer who makes you think, and hard on the way our goverments like to play the ostrich game, hiding the head in order to see nothing. I would love to keep reading about this matters in the future and in my limited resources to do what it is available for me to do. Good and scary read.

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in genocides that have taken place around the world. With the in-depth knowledge of these events that Samantha Power portrays it is surely a book worth reading by anyone and everyone.
Highly Recommended for those who want to be more informed about the capabilities of people and history itself.

Ms. Samantha Powers has spent countless hours and an immense amount of energy researching the issues and facts she discusses very eloquently. Her book not only discusses the various Genocides ignored by the modern world, but she also brings to light the greatest tragedy of Genocide - denial. If one is looking for a critical and substantive look at Genocide, I highly recommend this book. If one is looking for a white washed revisionist look at history, then I do not recommend this book. This book not only does justice to the millions of unrecognized Genocide victims, but also a great credit to historical writing and analysis.

Finally! Someone gets it right! Power presents not only an insightful analysis of the issue of genocide, but superbly weaves all the various elements that are involved in the practice of genocide - including the origin of the term genocide - to depict a complete conceptual portrait of it. I hope the message of Power's book - that genocides can be averted - reaches the ears of members of Congress and those in the Executive Branch who are charged with shaping U.S. foreign policy.