PSD-10 and the Origins of Iraq War 3

In light of the ongoing crisis in Iraq, Carter Page takes a look at the US’s current thinking on preventing mass atrocity crimes through multilateral responses.

In August 2011, President Barack Obama released the Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities or PSD-10. Although not frequently considered, the policy document and its genesis over the decade prior offers important insights into the core foundations of Iraq War 3 which began earlier this month.

PSD-10 stated that, “Preventing mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest and a core moral responsibility of the United States,” and established an Atrocities Prevention Board, “to coordinate a whole of government approach to preventing mass atrocities and genocide”. In his recent announcement regarding Iraq airstrikes on August 7, 2014 which received significantly greater media attention, President Obama similarly noted that, “We can act, carefully and responsibly, to prevent a potential act of genocide. That’s what we’re doing on that mountain.” These same fundamental defining criteria regarding genocide were subsequently reiterated last week in a statement from Martha’s Vineyard, as public notice in the U.S. and worldwide continued to grow exponentially.

Earlier in President Obama’s first term in office, Susan Rice and Samantha Power were two members of the Administration’s inner circle that played instrumental roles in introducing and establishing the PSD-10 policy. Despite the fact that each have served as President Obama’s representatives to the United Nations, the irony of PSD-10’s early execution in the Iraq context is how limited multilateral collaboration has remained in the policy’s practical application. After serving as the first office holder of the new position of Director for War Crimes and Atrocities on the National Security Council, David Pressman helped coordinate the initial implementation of this policy before more recently being appointed to a post with the rank of Ambassador at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations himself.

In a September 2001 article by Samantha Power, Rice reminisced about the role she played in events in Rwanda during the Clinton Administration. Rice noted that, "There was such a huge disconnect between the logic of each of the decisions we took along the way during the genocide and the moral consequences of the decisions taken collectively. I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required."

Samantha Power developed these ideas further in A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, a book published in 2002 while she was on the staff at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. “Over the course of the last century, the United States has made modest progress in its responses to genocide. The persistence and proliferation of dissenters within the U.S. government and human rights advocates outside it have made a policy of silence in the face of genocide more difficult to sustain. As Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic learned, state sovereignty no longer necessarily shields a perpetrator of genocide from either military intervention or courtroom punishment. But such advances have been eclipsed by America's toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view….”

Power went on to mention that, “Western governments have generally tried to contain genocide by appeasing its architects. But the sad record of the last century shows that the walls the United States tries to build around genocidal societies almost inevitably shatter. States that murder and torment their own citizens target citizens elsewhere. Their appetites become insatiable.”

In 2008, former U.S. cabinet officials Madeleine Albright and William Cohen chaired a Genocide Prevention Task Force which was organized by American think tanks including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Their report was specifically cited by President Obama in PSD-10, as he suggested the Task Force recommendations should be considered during the U.S. Government’s subsequent interagency review.

Just as Middle East expert Robin Wright has referred to the current state of affairs in Iraq amounting to a “feel-good phase of having helped prevent a genocide”, PSD-10 stands as the feel-good directive upon which these policies were founded. But as vividly seen in recent events in Iraq, the level of international collaboration regarding the 2011 mass atrocities policy has remained limited. Ambassador Rosemary DiCarlo, now Samantha Power’s Deputy at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, has previously suggested with respect to PSD-10 that, “The review also focused on how we can work with our international partners to more effectively prevent and respond to atrocities. We look forward to working with our partners to strengthen the international community's capabilities in this area.” The success of the future achievement of the objectives outlined in PSD-10 is very much contingent upon such coordination actually happening in practice.

Carter W. Page is Founder and Managing Partner of Global Energy Capital LLC, an Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs and Energy Fellow at the Center for National Policy in Washington.