Muhammad
Idrees Ahmad The
Electronic Intifada 8 June 2009
In Errol Morris’s 2004 film The Fog of War, former US Defense
Secretary Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, the architect of the
fire-bombings of Japan during World War II, saying that “if we’d lost the
war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” LeMay was merely
articulating an unacknowledged truism of international relations: power
bestows, among other things, the right to label. So it is that mass slaughter perpetrated
by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through
labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while
similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of
charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s
explosive new book, Saviors and
Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror.
