Using the past to support future intervention

Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention
By Gary J. Bass
Knopf, 509 pp., $35

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and so are many foreign interventions that turned out to be debacles.

In "Freedom's Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention," Gary J. Bass surveys some of these morally motivated actions and uses historical case studies to make the case for more frequent use of military force to fight genocide and other atrocities. A Princeton University political scientist, Bass has written a thorough and lively book that synthesizes a great deal of political and military history, with some engaging profiles tossed in for good measure.

He focuses on events in the 19th and early 20th centuries, such as the struggles for Greek independence and the Armenian genocide. When he writes about the Greek war in the early 1820s, he concentrates on efforts in Britain by a range of prominent citizens, most notably the poet Lord Byron, to raise awareness and push the government to act on behalf of the Greeks against the Ottomans. (The book's title comes from a Byron poem that reads, in part, "For Freedom's battle once begun. ..... Though baffled oft is ever won.")

In the United States, leaders were also sharply divided about whether to intervene on behalf of the Greeks. Former President Jefferson supported the Greeks but opposed intervention. Future President John Quincy Adams supported intervention but couldn't prevail politically. That was also the situation with Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. As a result, the United States could do little but watch the events unfold from afar. The British eventually intervened, and their efforts were crucial toward the outcome -- the Greeks' victory.

Although Bass writes approvingly of those who favored intervention and is much harder on those who opposed it, he takes a balanced approach, though he occasionally bombards readers with information.

Bass also devotes a great deal of space to the role of newspapers in highlighting oppression abroad. He notes, approvingly, that what some analysts have called the CNN effect (media attention causing improvements in the human condition) started centuries before CNN existed.

His narrative is most engaging when he uses the battle between competing figures to illustrate political debates over intervention. An example is the conflict between Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone over the response to the massacre in 1876 of 5,000 Bulgarians by a faction of the Ottoman Empire. The subplots in the two men's relationship -- including mutual distrust, a longing to outsmart the other and become prime minister (which they both did), and anti-Semitism -- made for quite a backdrop to the debate over whether Britain should intervene to protect the Ottoman Empire from the Russian invasion of 1877. Bass faults Disraeli's leadership for failing to get Britain to do the right thing, which was to intervene in the uprising.

While the historical examples are interesting in and of themselves, they are even better as case studies to back up his broader point that leaders should be less reluctant to engage in humanitarian intervention. Bass favors spreading human rights, not as a means of imperialism but to help countries improve their self-governance.

"The idea of protecting human rights is increasingly commonplace, but today's leading democracies have not yet shouldered the responsibilities that previous great powers did. We are all atrocitarians now -- but so far only in words, and not yet in deeds," he writes.

Given the decline in America's reputation during the last eight years, both John McCain and Barack Obama could learn a lot from "Freedom's Battle" about how to restore the country's moral leadership in the world.

Claude R. Marx is the author of a chapter on media and politics in "The Sixth Year Itch," edited by Larry J. Sabato.