Human Rights as Victim of Politics
By MAX BOOT

FREEDOM ON FIRE
Human Rights Wars and America's Response
By John Shattuck
390 pages. Harvard University Press. $29.95.

Most memoirs of government service are written by senior cabinet members or White House aides, and their theme, implicit or explicit, is: Look how powerful I was. The Clinton administration has produced a slew of books along those lines, by the likes of George Stephanopoulos, Sidney Blumenthal, Madeleine Albright and Robert Rubin. John Shattuck, who served from 1993 to 1998 as assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, has produced a different sort of memoir. Its theme is: Look how powerless I was.

Mr. Shattuck, a former American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, vice chairman of Amnesty International and vice president of Harvard, joined the State Department determined to elevate human rights to the top of the foreign policy agenda. He had every reason to expect that he would be successful, for as a candidate in 1992, Bill Clinton criticized the first Bush administration's policies from Bosnia to China as amoral. But Mr. Shattuck was disillusioned when he realized that there was no consensus within the new administration over the priority to be given to combating repression.

Only strong direction from the top could have broken through bureaucratic logjams, but President Clinton was seldom willing to provide that push. The president was more focused on economic concerns, and after the Somalia debacle in 1993 he was leery of putting soldiers into harm's way. Mr. Shattuck traces the results of that caution in four crises he participated in — Rwanda, Haiti, Bosnia and China — all of which he labels, confusingly, as "human-rights wars," a term he never defines and never distinguishes from plain old ordinary wars.

Mr. Shattuck tried to interest Washington in stopping the killing of some 800,000 people in Rwanda in 1994. But he had trouble getting the administration even to admit that "genocide" was occurring. He and other human-rights activists had more luck getting the United States involved in Haiti because it was closer to home and there was a domestic political constituency (mainly the Congressional Black Caucus) for reinstating Haiti's ousted president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. But although United States troops occupied Haiti in 1995, Mr. Clinton was so eager for an "exit strategy" that, in Mr. Shattuck's words, the country quickly "slid back toward its long tradition of political corruption and government repression."