David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 384 pp., $26.

"Blurbing" is the publishing world's term for soliciting advance reviews from an author's colleagues for inclusion on a trade book's back cover. Since only favorably disposed colleagues are solicited, the vast majority of "blurbs", unsurprisingly, are raves. Warning flares should therefore go up whenever blurbs are decidedly lukewarm, as they are for David Rieff's A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis. Three of its five blurbs are anything but rave endorsements. "I do not agree with all of Rieff's judgments", says Brian Urquhart, former UN Undersecretary General and widely acknowledged as a creator of UN peacekeeping. Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer says, "I disagree with some of his conclusions", and longtime human rights advocate Aryeh Neier invites the reader to "agree or disagree with Rieff."

When such critiques are the most favorable comments a publisher can solicit, there is usually a reason. And in this case there certainly is: despite saying very little--and saying it with mind-numbing repetition--Rieff manages to contradict himself so often that it leaves the reader shell-shocked in confusion and muttering in complaint. The only message that comes through clearly is that David Rieff is a frustrated fellow. He claims to be frustrated by the state of humanitarian intervention, something that in theory could be improved. But most readers will see that the roots of Rieff's frustration actually lie in the stubborn realities of human nature and international politics, which are not likely to be ameliorated anytime soon.

Rieff's main thesis is that there is a contradiction between "humanitarianism" and politics--even liberal politics motivated by human rights concerns. Thus, for Rieff, the growth of humanitarian intervention over the last three decades, and especially the 1990s, may have been a triumph of liberal politics, but it has left humanitarianism as a vocation essentially dead. This is an outcome he deeply mourns.

Readers may be forgiven for asking what in the world Rieff is talking about. The last decade has witnessed more humanitarian intervention, more funding for such efforts, and more claims of an international right (even a responsibility) for such intervention than ever before in human history. But, for Rieff, this is not humanitarianism because it has become entangled with politics. The key to understanding this puzzle is Rieff's definition of humanitarianism--which he never sets out in one place, but which can be gleaned nevertheless from the text. Pure humanitarianism exists when individual citizens, of their own volition and using their own funds, give medical assistance or food to people who need it without consideration of the politics in either their own state or that of the recipients. As he puts it, "Aid should be fundamentally apolitical and should have no other agenda than service and solidarity."

Rieff's most useful contribution here is to provide a typology and evolutionary history of humanitarian organizations. He divides these organizations into three categories, based on the extent to which they fit or stray from his definition of pure humanitarianism. Closest to his humanitarian ideal is a single organization, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Although the ICRC was established by a political act--specifically by multilateral government action in the Geneva Convention of 1864--it satisfies Rieff's definition of humanitarianism in most other respects. Specifically, it maintains a strict political neutrality, providing food and medical care wherever it is needed regardless of political considerations, and it refuses even to share information with the media or national governments about the political conditions it observes during the course of its work.

By contrast, both of Rieff's other categories comprise organizations that focus not merely on treating human suffering but also on identifying and ameliorating its root political causes. The first type consists of groups, typically European, that have traditionally maintained strict independence from their own governments but have spoken out about the political causes of humanitarian suffering. Within this category, Rieff describes great variation in the willingness of European groups to engage in politics. Britain's Oxfam, he says, has always had an explicit socialist political agenda. The French group Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), on the other hand, has engaged in politics reluctantly as a last resort. It was driven in this direction, Rieff explains, by cases in which pure humanitarianism was obviously ineffective or counterproductive in that it sustained the underlying political causes of human suffering by propping up oppressive governments or supporting inhumane rebel groups.

Rieff's final category is defined by groups that act in support of their national governments' humanitarian activities--which for Rieff are not really humanitarian at all by dint of their political genesis. These groups are typified by American refugee organizations during the Cold War such as the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which he disdains as little more than the "humanitarian arm of America's anti-Soviet struggle." He notes that European aid workers shared this view, deriding the organization as IR-CIA.

Starting from this typology, Rieff proceeds to blame the demise of humanitarianism on three trends that entangle the media, human rights advocacy and state interventionism together into an ugly, dysfunctional knot. He alleges that humanitarian organizations have made a devil's bargain with the media, starting with the Biafran war of the late 1960s. To garner resources for that relief effort, he says, the humanitarian organizations hit upon a formula that they have honed ever since. They package stories and images of human suffering for the Western media, who broadcast it back home. This, in turn, generates donations for the humanitarian organizations, thereby enabling them to provide relief and send representatives to the next crisis, where the cycle starts all over again.

The problem with this seemingly virtuous circle, Rieff points out, is that the tail has begun to wag the dog. Humanitarian organizations used to pick the conflicts in which to get involved based on an assessment of human suffering. But as media attention and funding for humanitarianism grew, the number of organizations proliferated rapidly, resulting in a Darwinian struggle among them for prominence and donations. The consequence of this process, says Rieff, is that aid efforts now tend to be focused on those conflicts that fascinate the Western media and public, not necessarily those where the need is most pressing. For instance, most relief work in the 1990s went to alleviate comparatively mild suffering in the Balkans--where the victims were white and threatened to flood the rest of Europe with refugees--while millions of black Africans died in conflicts from Sudan to Rwanda.

Rieff's second villain in the decline of humanitarianism is the West's increasing emphasis on human rights in its foreign policies. This is likely to confuse those who believe that humanitarianism and human rights advocacy are essentially the same thing, or at least closely related--as they in fact are. According to Rieff, however, the promotion of human rights is antithetical to humanitarianism because it calls for imposing sanctions against recalcitrant states to compel them to treat their people better. Such sanctions block trade and development aid (although usually not emergency relief), and thereby may increase human suffering in the short run. This Rieff characterizes as directly contrary to the humanitarian ethos. In Afghanistan, for example, he charges that post-Taliban nation-building efforts "made a mockery of humanitarian principles by in effect holding aid to victims hostage to the good behavior of states." Thus, by partnering with human rights groups and even adopting their discourse in media campaigns, humanitarian organizations have made a second Faustian bargain: they may bolster their fund-raising, but only at the cost of undermining the humanitarian essence of their work.

The final straw in the demise of humanitarianism, as Rieff sees it, is the increasing involvement of states themselves in humanitarian intervention. Contrary to most liberals, who applaud the advent of Western governments finally providing the financial and even military resources necessary for emergency relief, Rieff bemoans a distorted humanitarianism. Because states have now become the primary funders of major relief efforts, even formerly independent humanitarian organizations--the ICRC, Oxfam and MSF all included--have been reduced to suckling at the teat of the state, making them "effectively subcontractors of donor governments."

The problem is exacerbated, Rieff argues, by the fact that states have begun to label nearly all their interventions as "humanitarian", when invariably they are motivated by interests such as national security, reducing immigrant flows and promoting abstract and often ill-defined human rights--none of which satisfies his definition of humanitarianism. "These interventions invariably reveal mixed motives and hidden agendas", Rieff writes; as long as Western states pay the NGO piper, he implies, they will call a tune other than humanitarianism. Even when these military interventions support humanitarian objectives, Rieff insists that they still undermine the very soul of the enterprise: "A humanitarianism that supports the idea of war carried out in its name is unworthy of that name." The resort to force, he argues, is a "perversion of humanitarianism, which is neutral or it is nothing. . . . [I]magining that just wars can be joined with humanitarian imperatives is delusional and antihistorical."

There is some truth in this analysis, but there is nothing new about it. Scholars such as Richard K. Betts and the late Myron Weiner, and practitioners including Mary Anderson, John Prendergast and most eloquently Alexander de Waal, have long since laid out the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention. We have known for many years that humanitarian intervention is never politically neutral in the context of war, because food and medicine help not only civilians but also combatants. Thus, Rieff's holy grail--politically neutral humanitarianism--is a kind of intellectual unicorn: alluring and beautiful, but nonexistent.

Partly as a result of its shaky logical foundation, A Bed for the Night suffers from numerous flaws of argumentation, and the reader must suffer along with them. Perhaps most important, despite implying throughout that something is very broken in the current state of humanitarianism, Rieff never offers a solution as to how to fix it, or even what the goal of remedial action should be. He criticizes humanitarian organizations both for engaging too much in politics and not enough. For example, after tarring American organizations as pawns of their government's anti-totalitarian efforts during the Cold War, and European organizations as distorted by their promotion of socialism and human rights, it seems that Rieff is about to argue for a return to pure humanitarianism. But instead, the organization that most rouses his ire is the ICRC, precisely because it practiced pure humanitarianism during World War II. When Red Cross workers discovered evidence of the Holocaust in progress, they deliberately hid it from the outside world on the grounds that divulging it would be a political act that could endanger their humanitarian activities. For Rieff, this is a mark of shame that the ICRC can never live down. But what it really shows is the moral failing of the pure humanitarianism that Rieff spends the rest of the book advocating.

Rieff never resolves this contradiction. The best he can offer is simply an assertion that the ultimate solution lies in addressing the root causes of internal conflict, such as inequality and lack of economic development. Accordingly, he calls for the West to increase substantially its overseas development assistance. But, as he himself acknowledges, "development aid has largely been a failure." Thus does one fundamental tension between analysis and prescription beget another.

Nor is it clear why Rieff has chosen the present moment to sound the death knell for humanitarianism. The West now spends more money to care for more people in need than ever before. The essential cosmopolitan humanitarian ideal--the belief that all people everywhere, regardless of their social or political differences from each other, are entitled to compassion and the fulfillment of their basic human needs--has moved from utopian fantasy to an embedded political norm. The right of humanitarian intervention, a radical break from three centuries of international relations, is now taken so much for granted that political debate now focuses on whether there is a responsibility to carry out such intervention. Remarkably, this is the context for Rieff's declaration that humanitarianism is dead.

It isn't dead, not least because Rieff exaggerates the extent to which humanitarian organizations have become pawns of governments. These groups do embrace government contracts where they can get them, usually in the high-profile emergencies that are also the ones pursued by Rieff and his media colleagues. But NGO coordination with governments and militaries in complex emergencies actually enhances the delivery of relief aid. These relief organizations also still perform vital work in dozens of lower profile cases, where they neither benefit significantly from nor are distorted much by Western governmental largesse and oversight. If Rieff is saying that such small efforts pale in significance to the higher-profile government-funded cases, then it is he, rather than any organization, that has strayed from the humanitarian ideal.

Nor is human rights advocacy contrary to humanitarianism. Who can deny that the primary causes of humanitarian emergencies are rapacious and incompetent governments that are unable or unwilling to protect their peoples' human rights? Since Rieff himself acknowledges that "most humanitarian emergencies have their origins in human rights abuses", it is frankly hard to understand his insistence that the two be decoupled. Admittedly, the promotion of human rights is no panacea, and can give rise to unintended consequences when carried out naively. But some form of such advocacy is unquestionably part of the long-term solution to alleviating human suffering. The challenge is how best to integrate humanitarian, human rights and traditional national interest objectives--not to pick between them as if they were mutually exclusive.

At least as worrisome as the things Rieff gets wrong are the things he doesn't get at all. Among these, three stand out: the erosion of the norm of sovereignty, the logistical obstacles to effective humanitarian intervention, and the emerging challenge of moral hazard.

The norm of sovereignty persisted, after an admittedly shaky start, for over three centuries following its creation in the Treaty of Westphalia. During the past decade, however, it has been all but abandoned in the name of humanitarian intervention, with alarmingly little thought given to the unintended consequences. Supporters of this trend argue seductively that saving innocents from slaughter is more important than preserving a vestige of absolute monarchical rule. However, it is crucial to recall the historical logic in which the sovereignty norm arose. After decades of savage religious struggles, culminating in the carnage of the Thirty Years War, European statesmen realized that their pre-existing norm--waging war because one state did not like the domestic nature (usually the religion) of another--was a recipe for perpetual conflict. To avoid this fate, they agreed to reserve casus belli, the legitimate grounds for war, to the external actions of states. While this norm was sometimes breached over the centuries, it indisputably served as a brake on ideological wars.

To replace Westphalia, humanitarian interventionists have proposed the concept of "sovereignty as responsibility." States must earn the privilege of sovereignty by safeguarding their peoples' basic human rights; if they fail to do so, they surrender sovereignty to other states that may intervene militarily to restore those rights. The appeal of this notion is obvious but its practical utility is far less so, not least because states and societies do not agree on what comprises basic human rights. Do they include the right of women not to wear a burka and not to be subject to female circumcision? In some places those are basic rights, but in others they would violate local norms. Thus, the warm and fuzzy notion of "sovereignty as responsibility" reveals itself as a radical departure that would eviscerate Westphalia and raise the prospect of a widespread return to religious or ideological wars.

To his credit, Rieff warns that "any decision to be consistent" about using military force to impose human rights norms "would commit the world to war without end." However, he then bemoans the fact that Western states lack the moral courage to join this "utopian" battle. This is astonishing. No reasonable person can be cheered by the prospect of perpetual ideological war--except perhaps Osama bin Laden. Yet Rieff apparently wishes the West would take up the gauntlet.

Rieff also omits all consideration of the practical obstacles to military intervention, factors that can inhibit effective intervention even when the political will for such efforts exists. Three such obstacles stand out: the startling speed at which atrocities can be carried out, the relatively slow pace with which intervention forces can be deployed to distant theaters, and the difficulty governments have acting upon advance warning while avoiding unacceptably high false-alarm rates. For example, in Rwanda, most of the 1994 genocide was perpetrated during its first three weeks. It took two of these three weeks for the West to figure out what was going on, and even if the political will for intervention had existed (which it did not), airlifting a sufficient force would have required more than a month, too late to prevent most of the killing.

Although the West had ample warning that something bad might happen at some point in both Rwanda and Kosovo, no one knew for sure if, what or when it might happen--or whether something even worse might happen first in Burundi, Macedonia or some other hot spot. In other words, as with Pearl Harbor or September 11, advance warning becomes obvious only in retrospect. It is of little use for Rieff and other critics to bemoan the absence of political will for humanitarian intervention without also addressing these devilish details about how we can actually carry out such intervention effectively.

Finally, although Rieff uses the term "moral hazard" twice in the book, it is not evident that he really understands what it means. Put simply, moral hazard is when efforts to ensure against risk inadvertently promote risk-taking behavior. For example, the U.S. government provides insurance to protect depositors against the risk of bank failure; but as a result depositors don't much care which insured bank they put their money in, so they wind up putting it in riskier banks than they otherwise might. Analogously, the "moral hazard of humanitarian intervention" signifies a situation in which international efforts to ensure people against genocide and ethnic cleansing inadvertently trigger these very atrocities.

The dynamic is simple: under ordinary circumstances, most disgruntled ethnic groups do not take up arms against the state because they fear ruthless retaliation. As a result, most states have no incentive to carry out genocide or ethnic cleansing against subordinate ethnic groups. But when the international community announces a policy of humanitarian intervention to protect ethnic groups against atrocities, it actually increases the incentive for these same groups to launch armed rebellions. Leaders of such groups now calculate that if their rebellion succeeds, they win; if it falters, some outside force will spare them the greater cost of defeat--so why not go for it? The tragic, unintended consequence of a policy of humanitarian intervention is thus to trigger more rebellion, which in turn provokes more ruthless retaliation by state authorities. Any credible analysis of humanitarian intervention today must at least discuss this dynamic. Rieff's does not.

A Bed for the Night is not a coherent analysis but a series of fragmented musings by a very talented writer and reporter who wants to share his well-earned frustrations. Such a style can work in op-ed and short essay formats, where syncretic analysis is neither expected nor possible. But it falls flat in a book-length work, where emotional energy and a way with words cannot cover over a lack of intellectual rigor.