Jacob Heilbrunn has written a valuable essay on Samantha Power and her published works for the forthcoming issue of The National Interest. Andrew Exum and David Shorr both pick up on the apparent irony that Heilbrunn criticizes Power for “dramatizing history through people rather than considering broader forces” when he seems to be doing the same thing in identifying the fortunes of humanitarian interventionism with Power’s influence, but there is one place in his essay where Heilbrunn might have dealt Power’s post-facto moralizing a truly damaging blow along these lines and strangely doesn’t even try. This concerns Power’s remarkably anachronistic discussion of the Armenian genocide and what the U.S. should have done about it.

Heilbrunn writes:

Woodrow Wilson, eager to remain neutral in World War I, had resisted the calls of his ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, to protest the killings of Armenians. Power castigates Wilson for refusing to “declare war on or even break off relations with the Ottoman Empire.” She would have taken America onto the European battlefields—and into the bloodbath—far earlier. In going to war against Germany, Wilson told Congress, “it seems to me that we should go only where immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.” According to Power, “America’s nonresponse to the Turkish horrors established patterns that would be repeated.”

What Power does not discuss is Wilson’s conduct of the war, namely his decision to intervene after he had promised Americans he would not. If anything, Wilson, who promised the war to end wars, was wildly idealistic, anything but a hardened realist, someone who was bamboozled during the Paris peace negotiations by his French and British counterparts, the champion of the League of Nations, whose headquarters in Geneva became a testament to fecklessness during the 1930s. It seems peculiar to condemn Wilson for not having been idealistic enough.

This misses the point. The main problem with Power’s attack on American policy during WWI is that it is indifferent to the reasons why the U.S. never declared war on the Ottomans. This wasn’t just because the Ottomans had not attacked Americans. The same might have been said about Germany’s other allies. It was because the U.S. had large numbers of missionaries and students living in Ottoman domains who would have been in danger of imprisonment or reprisals had the U.S. gone to war against the Ottomans, and partly because there was a belief that Americans might be able to do more for the Armenians where they were. Power even acknowledges these reasons in her book, but clearly dismisses them. There was, of course, no notion in 1915 that the United States had a legal obligation to take military action on behalf of persecuted Ottoman subjects, and the idea that the U.S. could or would have entered a war against a state that had taken no hostile action against American citizens at this point in history is purest anachronistic fantasy.

Had there somehow been the political will to go to war against the Ottomans, it is hard to see how the U.S. could have actually intervened in a timely fashion that would have done any good. The Gallipoli campaign turned into a bloody disaster, and that was a fairly straightforward attempt to take the Ottoman capital. A campaign aimed at invading Anatolia for the sake of an oppressed, persecuted minority likely would have ended as the later Greek Ionian campaign did: a rout for the intervening army, and an even greater disaster (if that was possible) for the “protected” population. I have no idea how the U.S. or the other Allies could have embarked on a successful military intervention in eastern Anatolia in time to halt the genocide, and neither does Power. Even when the U.S. had entered the war on the side of the Allies in 1917, it took the better part of a year to mobilize, train, and transport American forces to France so that they were ready and able to participate in Allied operations.

I have discussed this before at some length, and I will close with a quote from my earlier argument:

If Power’s wish could have come true, tens of thousands of Americans would have perished making some equally ill-fated Dardanelles-esque landing in an ultimately vain bid to stop a mass slaughter, most of which had been accomplished within a few months from its beginning in April 1915, and the American witnesses of the crime who relayed their reports to the rest of the world would have been in no position to verify the genocide of the Armenians.

As the 96th anniversary of the genocide comes up on Sunday, it’s important that we remember it as the genocide that it was, and we should also not indulge satisfying stories that it could have been effectively prevented by outside intervention.