Half a loaf isn’t really enough

OK, this isn’t the most stirring announcement this month from the White House, but Michael Abramowitz is right to call attention to it.  The full statement is worth a read.

What it does is to put the emphasis on anticipating mass atrocities and preventing them.  This isn’t as hard as it sounds–those contemplating mass murder often announce their intentions, as Gaddafi did in preparing to take Benghazi and Hutu power advocates did in Rwanda.  But it is difficult for a bureaucracy to focus on anticipating problems when it has a full plate already on the table.  The Atrocities Prevention Board is an attempt to prioritize prevention.

Just as important is “the full toolbox”:

The President rejects the idea that, in the face of mass atrocity, our options are “limited to either sending in the military or standing by and doing nothing.” He instructs his Administration to undertake a 100-day review – to take an “inventory” of the full range of economic, diplomatic, and other tools available to U.S. policymakers; to develop the appropriate governmental organization to try to ensure early and less costly preventive action; to improve the collection and processing of indicators of mass atrocity; to provide a channel for dissent to be raised during a crisis; and to appropriately train and prepare our diplomats, armed services, development professionals, and others.

It would be easy to mock this as half a loaf, but I prefer to think it sounds like the beginning of a serious effort.  I think we can rely on Samantha Power and others in the White House to make sure there is some real result.  Too often, we’ve “missed the story,” in Roy Gutman’s journalistic but profound phrase.

The trouble is that history doesn’t wait for 100-day reviews.  As misfortune would have it, atrocities have already reached truly alarming levels in Syria.  The new ban on admissibility to the United States that the policy vaunts looks like a thin reed in the face of real horror.  Are Bashar al Assad’s cronies going to behave differently because they miss their vacation in Florida?

Let’s get that old-fashioned oil embargo out of the tool box, with a UN Security Council resolution to back it up multilaterally.  That would have a real impact.  And let’s not wait for that 100-day review.