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I just finished reading Chase Madar’s “Care Tactics: Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights” (The American Conservative, Sept. 1, 2009) and found myself responding out loud as I read, voicing my affirmation as I read, “That’s right!” and "It’s about time someone noticed!” and ultimately exclaiming “Amen!” as I read along to the conclusion.

Madar’s analysis is much needed, and provides an important service helping to illuminate the selective historical amnesia that riddled Power’s rambling A Problem from Hell. When I bought a copy of Problem from Hell several years ago, it was in the overstock bin at the Harvard Bookstore, marked down to a very humbled $4.99 per copy. There were dozens upon dozens of this Leviathan-like tome looking desperately for a new home, as if the publisher were only trying to recoup the printing cost on what looked at that moment to be an editorial disaster, something a good peer review might have prevented.

But politics being what it is, somehow this rambling, historically myopic work of sub-par journalism got the Pulitzer and Power’s been able to ride the genocide-gravy train to celebrity, demeaning this darkest of human tragedies by referring to herself as the “genocide chick,” and trying to make annihilatory acts of civil destruction somehow sound sexy.

Her work’s many acts of historical neglect troubled me as I read it, and the uncritical, adoring response to her work by media and pundits was even more confusing to watch as her work was rescued from overstock bins with its surprise Pulitzer pizzazz. After all, America had modernized genocide, made it national policy, and through its ruthless centuries of Indian removal, concentration, and annihilatory warfare policies, ethnically cleansed or exterminated millions of indigenous, and once proudly sovereign, peoples—violating Britain’s sacred pledge to respect indigenous sovereignty west of the Appalachians made in its 1763 Proclamation, and unleashing domestic holy war against America's first peoples in what was at its core a naked land grab fueled by a lust for fertile farmlands or newly discovered mineral deposits. In a century of American genocide, an entire continent was effectively cleansed. And that was just the first act.

When America faced its own confederate revolt against federal power, Washington applied the same principles of genocidal destruction to break the will of its southern secessionists, and later unleashed Sherman's proven total war strategy on the remaining hostile tribes in the still unconquered West. And that was only the second act.

Once America was cleansed of its original inhabitants and it crossed the oceans as a Great Power with imperial aspirations, putting down revolts in various countries like the Philippines, and seizing others outright (like Hawaii), it applied the fully digested lessons of its own long Indian Wars: that its own superiority of arms, men, and wealth enabled it to use the specter of genocidal annihilation to deter potential foes, and to crush through annihilation those who would not be deterred by American power, a lesson that permeated its own unique methods of warfighting, as revealed in its lethally effective tactics in Japan and Germany which later Secretary of Defense McNamara freely admitted were war crimes—applying the full weight of state power onto the undefended civilian populace of its foes. And this was only the third act.

During the Cold War, the entire structure of international relations was predicated on the potential unleashing of national destruction of our opponent: a doctrine that boils down to America’s continued willingness to inflict genocidal destruction upon its adversaries. Granted, it took two to tango, and America, like the Soviet Union and the lesser nuclear powers, turned to the bomb because of its unique efficiency in laying waste to an opponent’s homeland. We were not alone in courting the Apocalypse to ensure the security of our republic. But that was only the fourth act.

Now that we're fighting terrorism, insurgents, and a host of stateless actors, we’re refining our predisposition for truly democratic people's war of the sort Napoleon unleashed on European soil to the fractious, sub-state realm, and along the way have unleashed genocidal forces (as we saw in Iraq), collateral perhaps but nonetheless consistent with our historical willingness to engage in annihilatory warfare to achieve our millennial aims, no matter how high the price paid in human terms by our opponent. And this is thus the fifth act.

Madar importantly sheds light on other chapters in American foreign and military policy where America not only stood idly by but in fact armed, trained and unleashed genocidal forces in pursuit of its own interests, from Guatemala to Indonesia. But it is important to consider the deep domestic roots of America’s complicity in genocide, since war against a people is in fact the flip-side of total war, which since Napoleon has been understand as a people’s war, rooted in the mobilization of an entire nation for war. To Mao, this became revolutionary war, and to the Jihadists, it’s become Holy War. But across time and space it has been popular war, and the passions unleashed when unlocking the populace are an order of magnitude more destructive than those unleashed by unlocking the passions of the demos in the inter-polis wars of Ancient Greece, where the atrocities at Melos continue to haunt the western conscience and whose connection to modern war and modern atrocity was eloquently argued by Lawrence Tritle in his 2000 From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival.

So when I read Power passionately pleading that America’s moral obligation is to never again sit on the sidelines and allow genocide to happen—I wonder where she draws her lessons of history from, as she’s articulated an ideology that ignores America’s own military traditions, its own rugged frontier experience, and its centuries-old approach to world conflict—the very sources of its economic and military power.

When Serbia sought to rebalance the ethnic composition of the remnants of Yugoslavia to create a more stable and governable Balkan state, it was doing only what Lincoln did a century before, denying the aspirations for independence of the reluctant but nonetheless constituent components of the greater state—and for which we celebrate Lincoln now as the greatest of American heros—even though Lincoln’s war was one of America’s most savagely fought. (Lincoln is so revered that he enjoys not only a mighty monument in the nation’s capital, as well as a permanent spot on the $5 bill and the persistent penny, but even the Apostle of Hope -- not to be confused with the earlier Apostle from Hope -- President Obama, has annointed honest Abe to be his role model, and the bar according to which history will surely judge Obama’s presidency.)

When the Germans later sought to become the pre-eminent world power, they were following in the footsteps of the British, and the emergent American power, and as horrific as their excesses were (I am Jewish, so know too well the brutal human costs of Hitler's policies), they were no different from the actions of America as it became a continental power, crushing hundreds of indigenous tribes for merely being there, destroying the Confederacy’s very will to be self-governing, imposing its sovereignty on a reluctant Hawaii, and waging brutal wars of colonization across the seas.

Indeed, looking back on the brushfires of the Balkan wars, I wonder if we had let the Serbs have their super-state, and tolerated the one-time exodus of its displaced peoples to enable their raw but certainly normal (by any historical comparison) effort at state-formation, if perhaps the cause of peace and stability might have been better served, the departing Bosniaks perhaps enriching neighboring Albania with its human capital, restoring balance to the troubled Balkan Peninsula. And -- importantly -- perhaps Al Qaeda might have tasted its first defeat at the hands of an assertive, and unconstrained, state opponent, knocking Bin Laden’s movement off its game at a critical moment in its development.

And then I wonder, if we had not pointed the finger and shouted “Genocide” on a crowded continent as communism collapsed and nationalism reasserted itself as we did first in Bosnia (where we in fact tolerated genocidal retribution by the triumphant Croats and Bosniaks in the end); and later in the phony war in Kosovo, an historically legitimate constituent component of a sovereign Serbia (even after Yugoslavia's collapse)—a conflict waged by a phony American-sponsored militia, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), straight out of America's own counter-revolutionary insurgency playbook developed in Honduras on Negroponte’s watch for application against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—then perhaps the ambition of Al Qaeda might have been blunted, and the attacks of 9/11 never executed. Then, we’d not be bogged down as we are in Afghanistan or Iraq, unleashing genocidal fury along the way as we stumble our way through a mess that began, indirectly, with our very first efforts in the 1990s to make genocide our foe, attacking a tactic, a symptom, and not a cause, just as we do today in a war against terror, another tactic, another method, decoupled from its political causal roots.

And so when I read Madar’s persuasive and much needed article, I nodded and cheered my way to its very end. If only Power, and her distorted decoupling of American power from American history, did not have the ear of a President who seems intent on abandoning the millions of Iraqis who depend upon our innovation and grit to ensure their security, and then to rid the world of nuclear weapons which in the end are our best last hope against genocidal madness (with his Nobel Prize for Peace in hand).

Power's selective historical memory, and her antiseptic approach to American military power, in precise, seemingly painless increments and not in its blunt and effective supremacy, remind me of the escalation and bargaining theorists of the Vietnam era—many who like Power resided along the Charles River while dreaming of the Potomac—who sought to apply a similarly antiseptic approach to the very rough and tumble process of winning a war against a determined opponent mobilized for total war, a method that only brought humbling defeat, diplomatic betrayal, and the collapse of order across Indochina, resulting in the annihilatory fury of the Khmer Rouge (not a genocide per se, but a brutal class war), the internment and exile of millions of Vietnamese, and a precipitous decline in American power that lasted for a generation.

About the Author: Barry Zellen is author of Breaking the Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic (2008); On Thin Ice: The Inuit, the State, and the Challenge of Arctic Sovereignty (2009) and Arctic Doom, Arctic Boom: The Geopolitics of Climate Change in the Arctic (2009). His forthcoming four-volume book set, States of Mind: The Realist Tradition and the Foundation of Western Order, will present an historical and philosophical reinterpretation of the enduring tenets of political realism. It is due out later this year.