[Peace-discuss] We all make mistakes…, even Howard Zinn.

[Morton K. Brussel]

This response from Ed Herman is on ZNet:  http://www.zmag.org/content/ 
showarticle.cfm?SectionID=80&ItemID=13626

[Responce to Zinn's letter to NYT's]

Howard:

Your first sentence in your reply on Samantha Power astounded me. Did  
you actually read her book? I’m pretty sure you never read my two  
pieces dealing with her. The long text item below is from a review of  
her work that I wrote in Z in 2004. You should also read  the  
following:   Edward S. Herman, "Richard Holbrooke, Samantha Power,  
and the 'Worthy-Genocide' Establishment" (Kafka Era Studies Number  
5), ZNet, March 24, 2007



[part of review article on Power’s book}

The cruise missile left also adheres closely to the party line on  
genocide, which is why its members thrive in the New York Times and  
other establishment vehicles. This is true of Paul Berman, Michael  
Ignatieff and David Rieff, but I will focus here on  Samantha Power,  
whose large volume on genocide, “A Problem From Hell”: America and  
the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer prize, and who is currently the  
expert of choice on the subject in the mainstream media (and even in  
The Nation and on the Bill Moyers show).

  Power never  departs from the selectivity dictated by the  
establishment party line. That requires, first and foremost, simply  
ignoring  cases of  direct U.S. or U.S.-sponsored (or otherwise  
approved) genocide. Thus the Vietnam war, in which millions were  
directly killed by U.S. forces, does not show up in Power’s index or  
text. Guatemala, where there was a mass killing of as many as 100,000  
Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985, in what Amnesty International  
called “A Government Program of Political Murder,” but by a  
government installed and supported by the United States, also does  
not show up in Power’s index.  Cambodia is of course included, but  
only for the second phase of the genocide—the first phase, from  
1969-1975, in which the United States dropped some 500,000 tons of  
bombs on the Cambodian countryside and  killed vast numbers, she  
fails to mention. On the  Khmer Rouge genocide, Power says they  
killed 2 million, a figure widely cited after Jean Lacouture  gave  
that number; his subsequent admission that this number was invented  
had no effect on its use, and it suits Power’s purpose.

A major U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide occurred in Indonesia  
in 1965-66 in which over 700,000 people were murdered. This genocide  
is not mentioned by Samantha Power and the names Indonesia and  
Suharto do not appear in her index. She also fails to mention West  
Papua, where Indonesia’s 40 years of  murderous occupation would  
constitute genocide under her criteria, if carried out under  
different auspices. Power does refer to East Timor, with extreme  
brevity, saying that “In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti- 
Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and  
200,000 civilians, the United States looked away” (146-7). That  
exhausts her treatment of the subject, although the killings in East  
Timor involved a larger fraction of the population than in Cambodia,  
and the numbers killed were probably larger than the grand total for  
Bosnia and Kosovo, to which she devotes a large fraction of her book.  
She also misrepresents the U.S. role—it did not “look away,” it gave  
its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response  
(in his autobiography, then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick  
Moynihan bragged about his effectiveness in protecting Indonesia from  
any UN action), and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia,  
thereby facilitating the genocide.

Power engages in a similar suppression and failure to recognize the  
U.S. role in her treatment of  genocide in Iraq. She attends  
carefully and at length to Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical warfare  
and killing of Kurds at Halabja and elsewhere, and she does discuss  
the U.S. failure to oppose and take any action against Saddam Hussein  
at this juncture. But she does not mention the diplomatic  
rapproachement with Saddam in the midst of his war with Iran in 1983,  
the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during that war,  and  
the U.S. approval of  sales and transfers of  chemical and biological  
weapons during the period in which he was using chemical weapons  
against the Kurds. She also doesn’t mention the active efforts by the  
United States and Britain to block UN actions that might have  
obstructed Saddam’s killings.

The killing of over a million Iraqis via the “sanctions of mass  
destruction,”  more than were killed by all the weapons of mass  
destruction in history, according to John and Karl Mueller  
(“Sanctions of Mass Destruction,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999),  
was  one of major genocides of  the post-World War 2 era. It is  
unmentioned by  Samantha Power. Again, the correlation between  
exclusion, U.S. responsibility, and the view that such killings were,  
in Madeleine Albright’s words, “worth it” from the standpoint of U.S.  
interests, is clear. There is a similar political basis for Power’s  
failure to include Israel’s low-intensity genocide of  the  
Palestinians and South Africa’s “destructive engagement” with the  
frontline states in the 1980s, the latter with a death toll greatly  
exceeding all the deaths in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Neither  
Israel nor South Africa, both “constructively engaged” by the United  
States, show up  in Power’s index.

Samantha Power’s conclusion is that the U.S. policy toward genocide  
has been very imperfect and needs reorientation, less opportunism,  
and greater vigor. For Power, the United States is the solution, not  
the problem. These conclusions and policy recommendations rest  
heavily on her spectacular bias in case selection: She simply  
bypasses those that are ideologically inconvenient,  where the United  
States has arguably committed genocide (Vietnam, Cambodia 1969-75,  
Iraq 1991-2003), or has given genocidal processes positive support  
(Indonesia, West Papua, East Timor, Guatemala, Israel, and South  
Africa). Incorporating them into an analysis would lead to sharply  
different conclusions and policy agendas, such as calling upon the  
United States to simply stop doing it, or urging stronger global  
opposition to U.S. aggression and support of genocide, and  proposing  
a much needed revolutionary change within the United States to remove  
the roots of its imperialistic and genocidal thrust. But the actual  
huge bias, nicely leavened by admissions of  imperfections and need  
for improvement in U.S. policy, readily explains why Samantha Power  
is loved by the New York Times and won a Pulitzer prize for her  
masterpiece of evasion and apologetics for “our” genocides and call  
for a more aggressive pursuit of  “theirs.” 
  
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