Editor's Introduction: MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations; A Military Planning Handbook: Selling the Mission and/or Protecting Human Rights?

As we enter our sixth year of publication, the editors are very pleased to welcome readers to the sixth volume of Genocide Studies and Prevention. We have been very fortunate over the past five years to present a wide array of material related to the prevention and understanding of genocide and mass atrocities. This volume continues that tradition as it presents a symposium of invited commentaries on MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations; A Military Planning Handbook.

MARO grew out of the United States military Quadrennial Defense Review which contained a statement noting that the military needed to focus on "preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities or large-scale natural disasters abroad."¹ The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the US Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute collaborated in writing MARO.

MARO is the second recent attempt by the United States or related organizations to design policies to prevent genocide and protect civilian populations. Like its predecessor, Madeleine Albright and William Cohen's Preventing Genocide: A Blueprint for U.S. Policymakers,² MARO consists of what I would call semi-official US government documents. I say semi-official because these documents are actually sponsored and published by universities or other organizations. They are not official policy pronouncements in the sense that they are only recommendations and have not been incorporated into the decision-making apparatus of the government or the military. In common with virtually all such exercises, including Blueprint, MARO suffers from an excess of bureaucratic jargon, acronyms, diagrams that look as though they were designed by sixth graders after playing video games, and referents that often bear little or no relationship to reality—the reality, in this case, of genocide and mass atrocities. They also often ignore or rewrite history, or perhaps create their own version of history that suits their policy recommendations. All of these and many more specific critical and analytic views are expressed by the authors of the commentaries in this issue.

The immediate background of MARO is, most likely, the failure to stop the massive human rights violations in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Embarrassed and determined to justify United Sates policy that allowed those atrocities to occur virtually unimpeded, Albright and Cohen's Blueprint was published and followed by the present MARO. The United States had apparently been in denial about the role it played in allowing those atrocities to occur and had retreated from any idea that it would be engaged in protecting human rights as attention turned to terrorism after September 11, 2001. In March 2007 the US Army War College sponsored a conference titled The National Security Implications of Climate Change, and attention began to shift to the possible importance it held for military operations and how it would affect human rights around the globe. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began to slowly recede from public consciousness, the military saw the importance of a new mission in the new environment. This is described as "selling a mission"³ by Gwynne Dyer in his daring new book, Climate Wars: the Fight for Survival as the World Overheats. As he puts it,

The next mission of the U.S. armed forces is going to be the long struggle to maintain stability as climate change continually undermines it. The "war on terror" has more or less had its day and, besides, climate change is a real, full-spectrum challenge that may require everything, from Special Forces to aircraft carriers. So it's time to jolt the rank and file of the officer corps out of their complacency, re-orient them towards the new threat and get them moving.⁴

Of course, this also guarantees continued funding for the military, for those corporations that depend on military funding, and for the congressional districts that contain such installations. It means that when the missions in Afghanistan and Iraq end, the military will have a new mission. It is the answer to the debate started by...