The Good, the Bad, and the Invisible: A Critical Look at the MARO Report

American policy on genocide prevention often reads like a children's story or a screenplay for a Hollywood B-movie. The "bad guys" (the wolves) are committing horrific acts against innocent civilians (the sheep) out of sheer malice and can only be stopped by the "good guys" wearing the uniform of the US Army. The problem is that this approach not only dominates the media, but it has also become popular among academics.

Many well-intentioned Americans, outraged at the human suffering shown on network news broadcasts, call for immediate action to "stop genocide" at any cost. And because of the media's political agenda, this usually means human rights abuses in the Sudan rather than in Colombia or Sri Lanka. However, this "buy now" television marketing of foreign policy is hardly conducive to serious academic discussions of such a complex and contradictory phenomenon as systematic mass murder.

The Rule of Law

Simplistic calls for trigger-happy intervention in "genocide hotspots" ignore the fact that America too is bound by the rule of law. Ever since the first moral codes were developed by the Ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Babylonians, the primary purpose of law has been to repress or control our innate capacity for evil so that we can live together in peaceful communities. Similarly, modern international law, which began as an attempt to safeguard territorial sovereignty in the seventeenth century in Europe, has developed into a complex set of constraints to prevent us from harming others.

True, there have been attempts in the past to create a form of "enemy criminal law." The logic of such legislation is simple: those who fail in their duties as citizens forfeit their rights as citizens and can be treated as enemies. We need only define someone as a bad guy in order to place him or her beyond the law and give free rein to our worst impulses. Legislation of this kind has a long history in Europe where it has been used, among other things, to legitimate the Nazi genocide.

According to the West, in particular the United States, during the Cold War period the bad guys were the Communists in the East. Behind the Iron Curtain lurked the Red Menace and beyond that the Yellow Peril. Once the Cold War was over, this division of the world into capitalist (good guys) and Marxist (bad guys) was no longer sustainable. However, there has been renewed interest in enemy criminal law in the wake of 9/11. For example, the concept of "illegal enemy combatants" as developed recently by the Bush administration has allowed a stigmatized and dehumanized enemy to be imprisoned and tortured without trial, habeas corpus rights, or due process of law.

Down the Slippery Slope

Equally serious is the fact that the same massive and systematic human rights violations that were ignored during the Cold War era because they supposedly helped to defeat the common enemy are being used as an excuse for a new model of intervention in the twenty-first century. An insidious logic links Samantha Power's criticism of the United Nations and the US government for failing to "prevent genocide"¹ to the Responsibility to Protect (a US responsibility, of course) and, from there, to the explicit modes of intervention laid out in the Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) Report, a technical operations manual for US military intervention to prevent mass atrocities.

The Responsibility to Protect, together with a distinctly American interpretation of the concept, is mentioned explicitly in the opening pages of the report:

The MARO Project has emerged in parallel with growing consensus around the international norm of the "responsibility to protect" (R2P). The R2P concept was introduced in the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), which shifted the discussion away from the debate about whether a state had the right to intervene to save civilians at risk and toward the formulation of a state's "responsibility to protect" global citizens.²

On the next page, the report defines the roles assigned to the international community:

The...