[NYTr] Howard Zinn and Edward Herman on Samantha Power

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Joan Malerich

[Edward Herman is responding to Howard's Zinn first sentence in an 
article Zinn wrote to the NY Times regarding Samantha Power's book, "A 
Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide."  Zinn's first 
sentence is:  "Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in
chronicling the genocides of our time, and in exposing how the Western
powers were complicit by their inaction."  Zinn's letter follows
and then Herman's response.  Both the letter and response are short.

Herman explains how Power was very deceptive and evasive about US 
involvement in several incidents of genocide. I assume that Herman
would agree with most of the rest of Zinn's letter.-JM]

All from ZNet -

Zinn:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=13589

Herman:
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=13626&sectionID=1

On Terror (Letter to The New York Times, Aug 21, 2007

To the Editor:

Samantha Power has done extraordinary work in chronicling the genocides
of our time, and in exposing how the Western powers were complicit by
their inaction.

However, in her review of four books on terrorism, especially Talal
Asad’s “On Suicide Bombing” (July 29), she claims a moral distinction
between “inadvertent” killing of civilians in bombings and “deliberate”
targeting of civilians in suicide attacks. Her position is not only
illogical, but (against her intention, I believe) makes it easier to
justify such bombings.

[Powers' Review is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/books/review/Power-t.html]

She believes that “there is a moral difference between setting out to
destroy as many civilians as possible and killing civilians
unintentionally and reluctantly in pursuit of a military objective.” Of
course, there’s a difference, but is there a “moral” difference? That
is, can you say one action is more reprehensible than the other?

In countless news briefings, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney,
responding to reporters’ questions about civilian deaths in bombing,
would say those deaths were “unintentional” or “inadvertent” or
“accidental,” as if that disposed of the problem. In the Vietnam War,
the massive deaths of civilians by bombing were justified in the same
way by Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon and various
generals.

These words are misleading because they assume an action is either
“deliberate” or “unintentional.” There is something in between, for
which the word is “inevitable.” If you engage in an action, like aerial
bombing, in which you cannot possibly distinguish between combatants
and civilians (as a former Air Force bombardier, I will attest to
that), the deaths of civilians are inevitable, even if not
“intentional.” Does that difference exonerate you morally?

The terrorism of the suicide bomber and the terrorism of aerial
bombardment are indeed morally equivalent. To say otherwise (as either
side might) is to give one moral superiority over the other, and thus
serve to perpetuate the horrors of our time.

Howard Zinn

                                 ***

Response to Zinn on Samantha Power

by Edward S. Herman; August 27, 2007

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:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12404

[Excerpts from Herman:]

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."