From Sarajevo to Baghdad: David Rieff's muddled second thoughts on humanitarian intervention.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention - Book Review

At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention

By David Rieff Rowman & Littlefield Publishers $29.95

David Rieff is always a pleasure to read. In a field distinguished mostly by the clotted prose and lawyerly analysis of think tank denizens looking to secure their next political appointment, Rieff has been a welcome exception. His mission has been to prick the conscience of the West. In Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, he chronicled the passivity of the Clinton administration and western European governments as the Serbs conducted a genocidal war, while also articulating a sound case for humanitarian military intervention. Now, in At the Point of a Gun, he performs something of a U-turn. Reflecting on the Bush administration's expansive foreign policy ambitions, Rieff has had a change of heart about intervention. Looming over his book is the shadow of the Iraq War, and where Rieff once championed a kind of liberal imperialism, he now emerges as a chastened critic of intervention abroad, cocking a skeptical eye at both liberal human rights activists and neoconservatives.

Though Rieff's book consists of previously published essays, this is no tedious exercise in rehashing the past. Rieff has produced a vivid, if sometimes inadvertent, depiction of the agonies and internal contradictions of liberalism. The result is a kind of running warfare between RieffI and RieffII over the merits of intervention.

As Rieff acknowledges, his endorsement of intervention in the 1990s was based upon the conviction that it is immoral for the United States to remain idle in the face of genocide. In the aftermath of Kosovo, he says, it was clear that "there will be many more Kosovos in the coming decades.... Better to grasp the nettle and accept that liberal imperialism may be the best we are going to do in these callous and sentimental times." But his certainty apparently melted as the Iraq war turned into a protracted occupation. In fact, in his essay "The Specter of Imperialism," Rieff lays primary blame for what he considers the indiscriminate use of U.S. firepower abroad not at the feet of the neoconservatives, but on the humanitarian left. For example, he questions Samantha Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell, condemning her for a faith in a series of good outcomes from a single foray into this benign imperialism. Powers, according to Rieff, has a wishful rather than realistic approach to foreign policy...