At the Point of a Gun
Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention
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- $2.99
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
Veteran journalist David Rieff’s essays draw a searing portrait of what happens when the grandiose schemes of policymakers and human rights activists go horribly wrong in the field.
Writing for publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to The Nation to France’s Le Monde, David Rieff witnessed firsthand most of the armed interventions since the Cold War waged by the West or the United Nations in the name of human rights and democratization. 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.
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 a flag of convenience for the recolonization of part of the world? And, above all, can democracy be imposed through the barrel of an M16? This is not an optimistic report, 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.
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Democracy and human rights have become the rallying cry for American military adventures or, to critics, an excuse for a new imperialism. New York Times Magazine regular Rieff, author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (and the son of the late Susan Sontag), was once a partisan of humanitarian military intervention; these essays, written and published in the years after Bosnia, chart his disillusionment. Rieff analyzes the doctrine of interventionism from its origins in the human rights movement and outrage over the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides, to its reluctant deployment by the Clinton administration in Kosovo and its embrace by Bush administration neocons. From the guarded "yes" of his early "A New Age of Liberal Imperialism?" Rieff's misgivings grow as he ponders what he sees as the cynicism of Western powers, the appalling ease with which victims become postintervention victimizers and, especially in Iraq, the failure of military intervention to deliver on its promises. Chastened, Rieff rejects both the grandiose projects of Pentagon planners and the isolationism of the Chomskyite left; he allows that intervention may be necessary, but only as an exceptional last resort. Mixing reportage and gloomy reflection, Rieff views history as unending tragedy he titles one piece "In Defense of Afro-Pessimism," and the book's last words are "the future seems very bleak... and growing bleaker by the day." But his aversion to easy answers makes this a timely, probing response to contemporary geopolitics.
