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

by David Rieff

Writing from the front lines of the hot wars of the post-Cold War world -- the Balkans, Africa, the Middle East, and most recently Afghanistan and Iraq for The New York Times Magazine -- David Rieff witnessed firsthand most of the armed interventions waged by the West or the United Nations in the name of human rights and democratization. His report is anything but reassuring. In this timely collection of his most illuminating articles, Rieff, one of our leading experts on the subject, reassesses some of his own judgments about the use of military might to solve the world's most pressing humanitarian problems and curb the world's cruelest human rights abusers, presenting what, taken as a whole, is a thoughtful and impassioned argument against armed intervention in all but the most extreme cases.
At the Point of a Gun raises critical questions we cannot ignore in this era of gunboat democracy. When, if ever, is it appropriate to intervene militarily in the domestic affairs of other nations? Are human rights and humanitarian concerns legitimate reasons for intervening, or is the assault on sovereignty -- sovereignty that is as much an article of faith at the UN as it is in Washington -- a flag of convenience for the recolonization of part of the world? What role should the United Nations play in alleviating humanitarian crises? And, above all, can democracy be imposed through the barrel of an M16?
Collected here for the first time, Rieff's essays draw a searing portrait of what happens when the grandiose schemes of policymakers and the grandiose ethical ambitions of human rights activists go horribly wrong in the field. Again and again, they ask the Do these moral ambitions of ours to protect people from massacre and want match either our means or our wisdom?
Rieff's articles appear as they were written. Some, however, are accompanied by brief reconsiderations in which the author describes how and why his thinking has changed both as he has reflected on what it means, as in Iraq, to impose democracy by force, and as he has witnessed, firsthand, what that redemptive project actually looks like in practice.
This is not an optimistic report. To the contrary, it is the chastened conclusion of a writer who was once one of the leading advocates of such interventions. But the questions Rieff raises are of the essence as the United States grapples with the harsh consequences of what it has wrought on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Genres: Nonfiction, International Relations

288 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2005

About the author

David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism.

Reviews

[Merricat Blackwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I was reading this book I thought of it as kind of the non-evil twin of Samantha Power’s terrible A Problem from Hell. Rieff was at one point a committed “humanitarian interventionist,” but he had second thoughts based on the catastrophe of the Iraq War. He’s an excellent journalist with an incredible wealth of stories and observations, and an ambivalent but lucid critic of interventionism and willing to say what advocates like Power aren’t: namely, that a broad mandate for humanitarian intervention does in fact mean a return to a colonial world order. He rightly notes the bizarre absence in humanitarian interventional ideology of any skepticism of power. There’s no concern, for example, about the fact that major NGOs rely on donations from the very rich; there’s no sense that it might be deleterious for George Soros’s money to be absolutely critical to the functioning of entire states. I appreciate that Rieff is straightforward about this, although in other places he dodges. He criticizes Power, specifically, for slogans that don’t answer “the most essential questions--above all about the responsibility one has in advocating war when one will have little or no responsibility or say in how it is waged.” This seems like an absolutely dispositive point to me, and the one that is almost never addressed. You, average American citizen, may have wanted the US to intervene in Syria to support democratic formations against Assad’s tyranny, but the US military is not made up of democrats and humanitarians, and when you give them a free hand in Syria, what they actually do is funnel arms to whatever criminal group or death squad seems most pliable in the moment, and eventually you get US-trained jihadists slaughtering US-funded Kurds in Rojava. You also get US generals risking tens of thousands of civilian lives by bombing the Tabqa dam. And you, principled humanitarian, have no control over that! War is not democratic. Once you give the military license to act you can’t stop it from arming radical paramilitaries or dropping white phosphorus on cities or drone-striking civilians. This seems, to me, critically important to confront if you want humanitarian intervention to work, but Rieff gives it one sentence. And, like Power, Rieff almost completely declines to engage with situations where the US was or is the driving force behind a humanitarian catastrophe. The word “Guatemala” appears once; “Indonesia” appears once, in the context of its government’s corrupt dealings with the sanctioned Saddam Hussein; “West Bank” appears never.

Rieff is also highly critical of the U.S. occupation of Iraq for the usual reasons: the overreliance on Ahmad Chalabi, whose Free Iraqi Forces turned out to have no constituency and no actual sway among the Shiites he was supposed to win over; the sidelining of Thomas Warrick and the State Department’s planning groups, which at least attempted to prefigure a form of Iraqi democracy by facilitating negotiations between diverse Iraqi dissenters before the American invasion; the failure to make any preparations for post-war policing and peacekeeping; the failure to guard public buildings in the wake of the fall of Baghdad, with the fatally symbolic exception of the Ministry of Oil; the disastrous demobilization of the Iraqi army. Rieff’s diagnosis is that the U.S. simply can’t turn countries into democracies at will and shouldn’t assume that it can. This, to my mind, ignores a much more obvious problem: the US doesn’t want to make democracies. Rieff himself tips his hand to this when he describes why the US opted against a “one man, one vote” system in the elections that handed nominal control of Iraq over from the Coalition Provisional Authority to an Iraqi government, a decision that sparked massive Shiite protests led by Muqtadah al-Sadr. Quoting a State Department report, he writes: “Liberal democracy would be difficult to achieve … [and] electoral democracy, were it to emerge, could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements.” Well, yes; democracy isn’t democracy if your enemies can’t “exploit” it. Maybe in Rieff’s view this suspicion puts me on the “loony left,” but there’s a lot of empirical evidence that the US doesn’t want to cultivate democracies abroad, from the shameful 1980s incursions into Central America to the overruling of the Northern Alliance to insert Hamid Karzai as head of state in Afghanistan to the apparently endless national romance with Saudi Arabia. And again: if you want humanitarian intervention to work, don’t you have to look head-on at the evidence that the people in charge do not share your goals?

[SpaceBear · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book by Rieff is not compelling. It is basically a collection of essays written between the First Gulf War, Kosovo, and the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq. Although the theme of humanitarian interventionism and democratic statebuilding is the subject of each chapter, they don't bend together very well. Rieff notes that the purpose of the book is to show his changing views on interventionism over time, though this isn't much a reason to read the book. The articles are dated, the conclusions shaky, and the writing on Iraq is already well out-of-date.

[Arash Kamangir · Rating 1 out of 5]

آقاي نويسنده مدتي مقاله درحمايت از مداخله ي نظامي مي نوشته، حالا ديدش تغيير كرده. اين كتاب هم مجموعه اي از مقالات قديمي با مقدمه هاي جديد ه.