Obama Unveils Atrocity-Prevention Initiative

President Obama announced a new strategy to strengthen the United States’ ability to foresee, prevent, and respond to acts of genocide and mass atrocity. Preventing such injustice is a core national security interest and moral responsibility of the United States, stated the President in remarks at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., on April 23. “That does not mean that we intervene militarily every time there’s an injustice in the world. We cannot and should not,” he said. It does mean that the United States can wield effective tools—diplomatic, political, economic, and financial as well as intelligence and law enforcement and “moral suasion”—to help blunt such injustice, he said. As part of this initiative, Obama called for the Pentagon to develop doctrine and increase training to respond to such events. He also announced the creation of an Atrocities Prevention Board staffed by representatives from across the federal government to help identify atrocity threats and make the US government more nimble and effective in responding to them. (AFPS report by Karen Parrish) (Obama’s remarks) (See also White House fact sheet on initiative and fact sheet on Lord’s Resistance Army.)