Never again? What nonsense.
Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a
genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and
doing nothing to stop it. Even people who wish to know about the
problem do not wish to know about the solution. They prefer the raising
of consciousnesses to the raising of troops. Just as Rwanda made a
bleak mockery of the lessons of Bosnia, Darfur is making a bleak
mockery of the lessons of Rwanda. Some lessons, it seems, are gladly
and regularly unlearned. Except, of course, by the perpetrators of this
evil, who learn the only really enduring lessons about genocide in our
time: that the Western response to it is late in coming, or is not
coming at all.
Were the 1990s really that long ago? They are remembered now as the
halcyon and money-happy interval
between the war against Soviet totalitarianism and the war against
Islamic totalitarianism, but the truth is that, even in the years
immediately following the cold war, history never relented. The '90s
were a decade of genocides--unimpeded (Rwanda) and partially impeded
(Bosnia) and impeded (Kosovo). The relative success of those genocides
was owed generally to the indifference of that chimera known as "the
international community," but, more specifically, it was owed to the
learning curve of an American president about the moral--and therefore
the operational--difference between genocide and other foreign policy
crises. The difference is simple. In the response to most foreign
policy crises, the use of military force is properly viewed as a last
resort. In the response to genocide, the use of military force is
properly viewed as a first resort.
The notion of force as a first resort defies the foundations of
diplomacy and also of common sense: A willingness to use hard power
abroad must not become a willingness to use it wildly. But if you are
not willing to use force against genocide immediately, then you do not
understand what genocide is. Genocide is not a crisis that escalates
into evil. It is evil from its inception. It may change in degree if it
is allowed to proceed, but it does not change in kind. It begins with
the worst. Nor is its gravity to be measured quantitatively: The
intention to destroy an entire group is present in the destruction of
even a small number of people from that group. It makes no sense,
therefore, to speak of ending genocide later. If you end it later, you
will not have ended it. If Hitler had been stopped after the murder of
three million Jews, would he be said to have failed? Four hundred
thousand Darfuris have already been murdered by the Janjaweed, the Arab Einsatzgruppen. If we were to prevent the murder of the 400,001st, will we be said to have succeeded?
This elementary characteristic of
genocide--the requirement that the only acceptable response is an
immediate and uncompromising response or else we, too, will be
complicit in the crime--should have been obvious after the inhumane
ditherings, the wrenchingly slow awakenings to conscience, of the '90s;
but the discussion of the Darfur genocide in recent years shows that
this is not at all obvious. To be sure, there is no silence about
Darfur. Quite the contrary. The lamentations about Darfur are
everywhere now. There is eloquence, there is protest. Unlikely
coalitions are being formed. Movie stars are refusing to be muzzled,
and they are standing up and being counted. Even officials and
politicians feel that they must have something pained and wrathful to
say. These latecomers include the president of the United States.
All of this is to the good, of course. In
a democratic and media-maddened society, this right-thinking din is one
of the conditions of political action, as domestic pressures are
increasingly significant factors in the formulation of U.S. foreign
policy. But it makes no sense--and, in this instance, it is a
sophisticated form of indecency--to care about a problem without caring
about its solution. During the Bosnia crisis, there were many people
who cared about the ethnic cleansing and systematic rape of the Bosnian
Muslims, but they insisted that it was a European problem with a
European solution. They were half right: It was indeed a European
problem, classically so. But it was perfectly plain to every honest
observer of the genocide that there would be no European solution, and
that the insistence upon such a solution amounted to a tender
indifference to the problem.
