The Ghosts of Rwanda and the Responsibility to Protect
This weekend marked the somber anniversary of the beginning of a crime against humanity that continues to haunt a global community that had vowed genocide would never again happen on its watch.
Eighteen years ago, 100 days of terror started in Rwanda when Interahamwe, or Hutu militias, began hunting down minority Tutsis, while Hutus who opposed the slaughter were branded traitors or collaborators. “All Tutsis will perish. They will disappear from the earth,” cooed the sinister, incendiary Hutu radio broadcasts that swallowed the airwaves. “Slowly, slowly, slowly, we kill them like rats.” That included putting a priority on killing Tutsi children: “When you kill rats, you don’t spare the babies,” militia leaders said.
In that 100 days, some 800,000 people were killed — a fifth of Rwanda’s population. The landscape was literally littered with bodies hacked to death.
It was not a tragedy that caught the world by surprise. In January 1994, Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian serving as United Nations Force Commander in Rwanda, warned his bosses about a plan fomenting for Tutsi extermination. Kofi Annan, then the director of UN peacekeeping operations, said they wouldn’t take any actions that would put the UN in the position of having to use force.
Annan would later say they chose that route because letting the involved parties know that “we are monitoring, we are going to deal with you harshly and we know what you are up to” can be “a very good deterrent.”
Dallaire begged for troops to no avail, even though it was a matter of putting soldiers armed with guns and heavy weaponry against men armed with machetes. At one point, he tried negotiating with some of the killers when he noticed blood spots still on the clothes of the Interahamwe leaders.
“All of a sudden, something happened that turned them into non-human things. And I was not talking with humans, I literally was talking with evil. It even became a very difficult ethical problem. Do I actually negotiate with the devil to save people, or do I wipe it out, I shoot the bastards right there?” he said on the PBS “Ghosts of Rwanda” Frontline program.
“My mission failed and hundreds of thousands of people died,” said Dallaire, who spiraled into depression and drinking after the genocide. “And that — I can’t find any solace in statements like, ‘I did my best.’” He is now a senator from Quebec and advocate to stop similar atrocities.
Calling it “genocide” would have compelled the U.S. to act, so the White House danced around the world as much as possible. “As to the distinctions between the words, we’re trying to call what we have seen so far, as best as we can, and based, again, on the evidence — we have every reason to believe that acts of genocide have occurred,” State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelley said on June 10, 1994. “How many acts of genocide does it take to make genocide?” Reuters reporter Alan Elsner famously asked.
“I have phraseology which has been carefully examined,” Shelley would say when pressed on the administration’s terminology.
The Clinton administration was still stinging from the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia. Belgium was stinging from the mutilation and murder of 10 of its peacekeepers in Rwanda after a mob tricked them into giving up their weapons, and was lobbying the UN to close the entire operation. Upon hearing that the UN could leave at any time, Rwandans were actually asking peacekeepers to shoot them so they wouldn’t face a more painful death by machete.
The Rwandan genocide stands as one of humanity’s greatest failings. That massive death toll was preventable.
Former President Bill Clinton told a crowd in Kigali, Rwanda, in 1998 that “we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred.”
“It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror,” Clinton said.
However, documents unclassified in 2004 showed that Clinton had decided early on not to intervene and proved that the White House was receiving detailed reports almost daily of the carnage during all three months of the genocide.
Bridget,
What about N. Korea… the Kurds in Turkey… what is boiling to the surface for all groups in Iraq… do I really need to go on. When would we not have our young troops some where saving someone? How would we “win” without the control that the former colonial powers had? When could we leave? Oh, boy, that last is one you forget about, huh? Fair questions all are they not?
But here is a solution. In the ’30s progressives were not satisfied that the US remained uncommitted in the Spanish Civil War so they formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and crossing the Atlantic on their own and pitched in. Idealist all.
I can palpably feel your dissatisfaction (“I feel your pain”) at our inactions in Rwanda and other places, perhaps some mentioned above. Instead of putting other people’s children in harms way you could take care of it yourself. It, it, could be called, yeah, the Carrie Nation Brigade.
So when are you leaving? I want to see you get off.
The people of the Lincoln brigade should have stayed at home instead of meddling in something they didn’t understand
Actually the Spanish left had come to power through electoral fraud, threatened with civil war in 1932 after it lost elections, was daily murdering right wing oppositors, explicitly told it would not accept vacating power if it lost a posterior election and initially welcomed the military rising since it thought (*) it would easily win then war and then would have the pretext to do away, Stalin style, with the opposition. (Margarita Nelken: Our revolution wll not be like the russian one, ours will taint in red the oceans of the whole world)
Did I mention most of the rebels were republicans and wanted to restore the republic not to instore a dictatotrship?
Also, we know what Franco answered to Hitler after the fall of France a heaavily laced version of “Nuts”, we don’t know what whould have answered the Spanish republic had it prevailed. It is a definite possibilility that at a time French communists were sabotaging French tanks and American ones helping isolationists and fomenting strikes in American factories providing weapons to the UK, that the communist dominated Spanish republic would have given to Hitler the bases Franco denied hilm. Had German submarine been able to sail from Vigo instead of from Brest it is probable Germany would have won the battle of the Atlantic and strangled the UK.
(*) With half the army, most if the fleet and of the airforce, plus all the ammunition factories loyal to the governmenet the rebels seemed doomed
Spain
General Francisco Franco of Spain was another leader whose ideological sympathies with National Socialism led him to the brink of a close alliance with the Reich. Like Salazar, however, he refrained from completely crossing that line. In March 1939, Spain concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact with Nazi Germany (it augmented the secret treaties for diplomatic and economic cooperation of March and July 1937). And as of June 13, 1940, Franco moved Spain from neutrality to nonbelligerency, which reflected unambiguous sympathy for the Axis. Yet he kept Spain out of the war, while pursuing a program of self-interested collaboration. Despite a concerted effort on the part of Hitler (most noticeably in a meeting between the two dictators and various ministers in October 1940) to persuade Franco to provide full-scale military support to the Axis side, the Spanish dictator refused to do so. The Generalissimo demanded colonies in French-held northwest Africa as payment for such a commitment. Hitler’s unwillingness to agree — he didn’t want to alienate Vichy France and lose its resources, including the French fleet — strongly motivated Franco’s ultimate decision not to allow the Spanish armed forces to fight for the Axis. (A division of approximately 47,000 Spanish volunteers, the so-called Blue Division — the name was derived from the unit’s blue Falangist shirts — did fight on the Eastern Front as part of the Wehrmacht.)
With respect to immigration and transmigration policies, the Spanish were similar to other neutrals: there was a general reluctance to accommodate refugees. Requirements for visas were both stringent and variable, and the Spanish bureaucracy frequently created nightmarish situations for those trying to flee the Nazis. One thinks of the distinguished German man of letters, Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide in France after being denied haven in Spain in 1940. He had climbed over the Pyrenees despite heart problems “only to learn that Spain had closed the border the same day and that the border officials did not honor visas made out in Marseille.”27 Others, however, did reach safety in Spain: Heinrich and Golo Mann, Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel were among the most illustrious of these individuals. One historian has stated that 28,000 fugitives were smuggled across the French-Spanish border during the war, including 20,000 Frenchmen (many of whom later fought for De Gaulle’s Free French forces28). The Spanish, then, were much like the Swiss when it came to assisting refugees: while they attempted to discourage those seeking asylum, in the end they did save a number of lives. It should also be noted that during the latter part of the war, the Allies channeled pilots and soldiers rescued from the Nazis through Spain.
As for economic and financial collaboration: Spain played a role within the Nazi New Order, but retained a certain autonomy and prevented the Germans from completely exploiting Spanish resources. At the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Nazis, through Göring and his agent Johannes Bernhardt, had established a trading company in Spain called the Sociedad Hispano-Marroqui de Transportes (HISMA), which coordinated trade in a manner advantageous to the Germans.29 In return for German arms, Franco eventually provided valuable mineral resources and other raw materials to the Reich. By the end of the Spanish Civil War and the onset of World War II, Franco had incurred significant debts to the Germans and this increased Hitler’s leverage over the Generalissimo. On December 22, 1939, Spain and Germany signed a treaty in which Franco “agreed to reserve the greater part of [his nation's] exports for Germany, in particular iron ore, zinc, lead, mercury, wolfram, wool, and hides.”30 Spain, then, contributed significantly to the German war effort, at least up to the autumn of 1942, when the Allies’ military campaign in North Africa induced Franco to adopt a more cautious policy.31 However, economic relations between Spain and Germany continued until the end of the war.
Spain is also comparable to Switzerland in that the Germans made use of it as a repository for assets. (The relative volume, however, was in no way comparable: the Reich made far greater use of Switzerland than of Spain.) Late in the war, when the outcome of the conflict looked increasingly bleak for the Axis, Göring, Bormann, and other Nazi leaders dispatched assets, including works of art, to Spain, hoping to preserve them for future use. After the war, investigative journalists claimed to have uncovered a project, overseen by Martin Bormann and code-named Tierra del Fuego, which entailed sending Nazi assets to South America. This scheme, if in fact true, involved using Spain as part of the pipeline.32 The smuggling of assets is difficult to document with any precision. But it occurred, and Spain — like Switzerland — figured in the Nazis’ schemes.
http://www.adl.org/braun/dim_14_1_neutrality_europe.asp#top
Withou Franco you would be speaking German and I suspect you would live it and that is teh reason yiou ahtre Franco (&ad America so much). Also,a country who out of hate of America doesn’t hesitate a second in forming a union with people whose hands reehed of Zyklon B or who had taken part in the mass rapes of Russian women (your averahge German when the EEC was formed), sells WMDs to Saddam, whjo through the Al’Dura case tyries to put the ME ablaze so it can rest political and ecnomical benefits (BTW, Bin LMaden mentionned the AL Dura fake as one of the reasons for 9/11so ome of this blood is in Francé’s hads), arms, cvers teh retreat and reamrms the Rwanda genociders and last but not least has streets and monuments with the name of a man (Mitterrand) who, in any civilized country, should have ended like Eichmann is nothing to be proud of.
Attention, JFM tu diminues, toujours ces vieilles litanies d’il y a 3 ans?
tu radotes comme un vieux Schnock
But Petain proved to be too clever by half. While he fought against a close Franco-German military collaboration, and fired his vice premier, Pierre Laval, for advocating it, and secretly urged Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco to refuse passage of the German army to North Africa, his attempts to undermine the Axis while maintaining an official posture of neutrality did not go unnoticed by Hitler, who ordered that Laval be reinstated as vice premier. Petain acquiesced, but refused to resign in protest because of fear that France would come under direct German rule if he were not there to act as a buffer. But he soon became little more than a figurehead, despite efforts to manipulate events behind the scenes that would advance the Free French cause (then publicly denying, even denouncing, those events when they came to light).”
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/marshal-petain-becomes-premier-of-occupied-france
That genocide was not preventable unless you cozen the notion that America and Europe are actually political entities that cover the entire planet. In that sense, it is not a question of the value of life but of national sovereignty and exhausting the energies of the West to root out and solve every ethnic or political problem that arises, from Bosnia to Bolivia and from the Congo to India. Horrible as it may sound, America cannot be on eternal fire watch, we have our own lives to live and I have not dedicated mine to solving the world’s problems nor will I have my gov’t ‘volunteer’ me. There are many dedicated and compassionate people who care about these issues, but they want to involve the entire world in their personal crusades. The world’s problems, particularly in the Third World, will never be solved and it is foolish to think so.
How many American men died in our Civil War, 1 in 15? Countries have to work out their own problems and it is made almost impossible when swaths of the world are kept artificially alive by U.N. programs; there is nowhere to go but down unless you posit nearly entire countries that cannot or will not stop having children as being on eternal welfare.
I don’t know the answers but diverting our monies from space exploration or scientific research in the name of humanity and dedicating ourselves to putting out brush fires large and small in Libya, Syria, ad infinitum is surely not a policy that can ever do anything more than keep grief afloat and spread it around to the entire globe while the West experiences demographic subversion by mere contact with these disasters and the subsequent refugees. Is a permanent status of refugees really something else?
And what’s next, mass genocides in areas of China, the Indonesian outlying islands, people exploding out of shanty towns in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro, political murder in Nigeria and Mali, slavery in Mauritania; let our equals be equal – equal to the task of governing themselves. We have a nice enclave here and we are crapping it down the toilet.
That’s the key. It’s easy to say “Never again”, but do we want the U.N to butt in the next time that we have an internal disagreement? Suppose, for instance, that the New Black Panthers have their way and start a race war, butchering “honkies, these crackers, these pigs, these people, these motherf*ers….” Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/new_black_panthers_booted_suited_and_armed_for_coming_race_war.html#ixzz1re83fCMY Would we want the possibility that the U.N. and African peacekeepers might come in on their side?
R2P is, and always has been, a bad idea, it sets a terrible precident for the violation of the national sovereignty of independent nations, at the whim of the so-called “international community”. It was used to justify military intervention in the civil war in Libya, which was, by any definition, an internal Libyan matter, while R2P has done nothing to prevent horrors such as Darfur. At what point does the “international community” decide that it has the authority to use military force on the US to enforce it’s dictats on the American people? It could potentially be claimed that the “international community has the moral duty to protect, for example, the hundreds of thousands of fetuses that are aborted each year in the US, which could, with some justification, be considered a holocaust.
Bridget Johnson has been absorbing the foul air of the Potomac swamps for too long. It’s time to rotate her to a different beat and bring in somebody else from Flyover Country.
“Responsibility to protect” is a hard-left concept that seems to be a retread of the former Soviet Union involvement in “wars of liberation”. Its present version comes out of the playbook of failing/failed UN ambassadors Susan Rice and Madeleine Albright.
“Humanitarian wars” are a lie. That lie was used to get the US and NATO fighting on behalf of the mujahideen in the Balkans, against the Christian Serbs. There never was a humanitarian crisis, except on the part of the Serbs who lost a vital part of their homeland.
EXACTLY. Supporting a robust defense is NOT the same thing as supporting the role of “Leader and Protector” of the world. The military’s sole purpose is the defense of the United States, to waste the lives of the best among us simply to salve the concious of internationalists is criminal.
“We have a UN Human Rights Council tainted by the membership of human-rights abusers. We have a Security Council where authoritarians protect tyrants and successfully block any real action to battle crimes against humanity. We have a public unwilling to buy that a regime’s brutality against its people is reason enough for it to go. These are hurdles hard for any country deemed insignificant to overcome, even if armed with social-media public awareness.”
Which is why an organization like the UN is so dangerous. People actually think it will DO something in a crisis. They still don’t understand that it’s an impotent money-pit of a debating society that is thoroughly useless in almost every global emergency there is. And when their black African UN troops are not raping or looting or stealing diamonds in Africa, they usually turn a blind eye to all of the violence around them. THAT is why the UN is so dangerous. People actually put their trust into that corrupt institution and, as a result of that, usually die because of it. Not only in Rwanda, but places like the Balkans or Haiti. Every time the UN generally tries to protect people, the people they try to protect are usually harmed more by their “protection.”
If the intention of the UN is to help people, then its members should be required to come to the assistance of people in real danger (such as those pathetic individuals in Rwanda). The irony is that most of the slaughter could have been stopped by probably less than 5,000 heavily armed troops, which really isn’t that much in a country the size of Rwanda. But if nobody is going to take their responsibilities in the UN seriously, if they are only going to pay lip service to actually providing aid to people in danger, and if they will turn a blind eye whenever real help is needed, then this organization is worse than terrible. Because people who rely on it for their safety will always be let down and they will usually end up paying for that misplaced trust with their lives.
You mean the same Syrian “democracy movement” that talks of wiping out the Alawi minority and ethnically cleansing the country of Christians and Druze by doing a Trail of Tears style forced deportation? F#$% them. They deserve al-Assad.
There are numerous problems with this kind of intervention.
The first is that the very people who are demanding action are invariably the first to turn against us the moment that anything goes wrong. The attention span of the average liberal is shorter than a celebrity marriage, and their cause du jour changes with the news cycle. Just because today’s Prius has a “Save Darfur” bumper sticker doesn’t mean that it won’t change to a “US out of Darfur” within minutes of our trying to save it.
The second reason is that these missions never end. The Hutu/Tutsi tribal conflict goes back over a century, but was suppressed by European colonial governance. Just as the tribal and religious conflicts in the former Yugoslavia came back after the collapse of the government, so did the Hutu/Tutsi conflict when the central authority became too weak to enforce the temporary truce. Any peacekeeping mission is only a temporary respite. The underlying tribal hatreds remain and fester until the peacekeepers leave, at which point we are back to square one.
We cannot impose peace from the outside. Until one side has decisively defeated the other, there is not peace, only ongoing conflict of varying degrees of intensity. Peace comes from either victory or the knowledge that the oppressed will not fall easily. If the victory of evil offends us, then we should prepare the good to defend themselves.
We as a Nation owe the rest of the world nothing. The UN was founded to deal with this type of problem and has failed. Cambodia, N.Korea, Syria, the Kurds, several African countries. The list is unending. What about China with the Red Guard? Should we have sent troops? What about the USSR when Stalin killed millions should we have sent troops? Afghanistan? Once we went from killing AQ and the Taliban to “Nation building” more good Troops died. I do not think Afghanistan is worth one more life or one more dollar. Let them kill their wives and other tribe members, let the Taliban have the country, just destroy the opium crop on the way out.
No! No more American blood for others not being able to play nice with each other.
Speaking of placing no value on the lives of citizens of another country, where is the outrage about the American government moving guns to Mexican drug cartels? Hundreds of random Mexicans (human beings) have been killed and are being killed because of the Operation Fast and Furious propaganda scheme. Yet Democrats in congress and the mainstream media either attempt to provide cover for the perpetrators or maintain an eerie silence, while the perpetrators stonewall investigations.
I do not think what is happening in Syria is a humanitarian crisis exactly. It is a civil war against a brutal regime. I am not really very comfortable with the opposition however.
What is really shameful is the hypocricy in treatment of refugees by the Arab states when it comes to the beloved oppressed Palestinians.
In the Iraq war Syria took in thousands of refugees except Palestinians. They were forced into a buffer zone between Syria and Iraq and denied refugee status. Now reports are that Jordon is considering the same thing, a buffer zone for only Palestinian refugees and no others. Reported in Elder of Zyon today from arab press.
Yet these same people castigate Israel as the root of all evil. It has become crystal clear that this has nothing to do with the Palestinians. It has also become clear that the Palestinians have no interest in peace and two states.
Israel is evil because it is Jewish state in Dar al Islam and nothing but its destruction will satistfy them. In the case of Syria both the regime and its opponents have the same goal concerning Israel. As we saw in Egypt things are worse now than under the dictator. In Syria someone is going to end up with a very large arsenal of chemical and other weapons. If they are fighting each other I wish them both success.
In other news today a promising vaccine treatment for cancer is undergoing clinical trials and was deveveloped in a certain middle eastern country. Guess which one?
Next week I’ll read how we need to send troops into some other fire hole, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one, and…
How many of these losing situations shall we send young Americans? Is this one reason why millions of jobs have gone to China, with politicians approval, to make our military the only place American youth can find a job?
Just when can taxpayers expect the oceans to stop rising, and all that planet begin to heal stuff…?…as soon as the peace-loving Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt get their 1 billion, I suppose…
Ooooohkay…that’ll bite us.
Maybe someone can articulate precisely how the US was supposed to intervene in Rwanda? The practicalities of that intervention are probably beyond most grinning idiots who criticize us for not doing it, but the facts were (and, still are) that Rwanda is an isolated country in the middle of Africa. In order to stop a genocide like the one that was going on, you would have needed a huge number of troops, far more than could have been supported by air through Rwanda’s limited infrastructure. That means they would have had to be supplied via ground across some of the most forbidding terrain (both physical and human) in the world, with materials put through ports we didn’t control, over roads that barely exist, and in the face of likely resistance from the nations those roads ran through. At the end of the day, it was a choice of either making a grand gesture, squandering a couple of brigade’s worth of US troops who would likely have died right alongside the people they were trying to protect, or of mounting a land-based expedition on a scale that would have made Iraq look like a walk in the park.
The fact is, even if the Clinton administration had wanted to, timely intervention was virtually impossible due to the logistics of the situation. Pretending otherwise is pure wishful thinking, I’m afraid.
George Washington answers you, in his farewell address:
It is not America’s responsibility to police the world, nor it is possible, nor is it wise to attempt it.
Washington’s advice to avoid foreign entanglements was based on the knowledge that the US had the power to seriously harm foreign invaders. It was a concrete national defense characteristic which could not be described as there were no words for it.
Firearms freedom mutated the awful, heavy Central European rifle into the “Kentucky” rifle, a radically different thing. Years of hunting gradually taught the rifle user where the sights say the bullet will go and the finger learned how not to disturb that. A rifle is like a violin, the skills are in the user. Long use makes Proficiency. Rifles were enormously expensive and only made sense on the frontier. Elsewhere, smoothbores. The June 1775 group of riflemen Congress formed as their first military unit brought their own rifles with them. They went to Boston, amazing the populace and terrorizing the British. Recruiting dropped to zero and Hesssians had to be hired. They ruined the British center at Saratoga, leading to our win. They won Kings Mountain and The Cowpens, collapsing the Southern Front. No one could describe what they did as there were no words. Washington was Proficient, hence his forming of the June 1775 force. These Proficient people were all over and could be called up. They could hit what they could see. Two of them prevented the burning of Baltimore and facilitated the winning of the Battle of Baltimore by the green Maryland Militia. Proficient rifle shooters were the foundation of Washington’s observations.
Mr Michael Savage says that one bomb on one radio tower would have cut the broadcasts short. Why not simply admit that the UN is a feckless cesspool, and disband the whole thing?
And, well, the Organization of African States has boots on the ground, right there. And, well, treaties. Why did they not police their own? They have treaties, agreements, understandings, and troops right there, right then. There isn’t a chance of colonialism, or racism, or imperialism.
Unless you are proposing some astounding feat of colonial occupation for America, where not only do we fling our citizens into harm’s way, we then keep our troops on the ground to pacify whatever region calls on us, we don’t have any business leaping into whatever frayed third- world hell-hole bubbles up.
Our citizens are worth more to us, than to them. It’s sickening that we keep getting hustled- can I borrow your military- I promise I’ll bring it back unharmed- it’s a con that most kindergarteners learn is a hustle.
And, honestly, if nations do ask that we send soldiers- we are just as entitled to send missionaries, traders, tourists, and farmers. We can’t just send a military, and then expect that the country remain unchanged.
It is completely horrifying the barbaric excesses that all these different small countries are riven with. Why aren’t they learning to dig wells, or build roads, or trade, or live peacefully with their neighbors? A mother at the park, here, in America, was on the phone with her MIL- who was looking out her windows at the bodies stacked up like cordwood at the end of her front garden- in Cote d’Ivoire, last year. That wasn’t on the news at all. She was on the phone when soldiers invaded her house. She pretended to be insane, and they left her alone.
Whatever we did to learn to be at peace- and I don’t know that it’s modern NGO’s- we need to let people learn that. I think missionaries are as good a start as any. WorldVision, Lutheran World Relief, any Catholic anything, the trees in Israel project. We don’t know which flavor of westernism catches which imagination.
I mean, as well, right now, we are on the border with Mexico, and our government has let guns flood into a sovereign other nation. the violence backwash has barely made the national news. I don’t know that our government has any moral standing, in the first place.
On a sheer visceral level, I don’t want America policing the world and sending our people to defend other countries battles. Wait, on a sheer visceral level, I want America policing the world and protecting everyone’s rights. When to intervene? It comes down to national interests, and what country doesn’t play that game? America cannot possibly be the Global Cop to every ethnic war or conflict, and while I detest evil in its most violent forms — everywhere and anywhere — I am grateful that America does not soley act on a visceral level when it comes to her security and interests.
One thing that is missed in all the discussions about the Rwanda horror is that the Tutsi-led rebels won. They routed the Hutu militia, and sent vast numbers of panic-stricken Hutu civilians fleeing into the Congo, fearing the victors’ revenge. Yes, it was a terrible slaughter — literally Hell on Earth, but the victims’ ethnic compatriots won the war that was going on in the background. As ugly as the victory was, Rwandans resolved the issue themselves. Rwanda is considered one of the safest (comparatively) central African countries for foreigners to travel through — FWIW.
R2P is an excuse for aged hippies like Samantha Powers in the White House to pretend to save humanity by engineering cheap victories where genocide is not actually happening, as in Lybia. Granted civilians were dying in large numbers, but the principal objective was a war for European oil supplies. That adventure was also a monument to Oabama lawlessness. As I recall, he never obtained Congressional permission for that mission. It was also the beginning of the current administration’s intent to make the U.S. military a mercenary arm of globalism. “R2P” was a disingenuous excuse to fight a war that will end up installing AMerican-hating Islamofascists in power in an oil-rich country.
US intervention could have been cheap. Use the Uganda world view, and helicopters. Broadcast a message saying: “All killing must stop. If you do not stop, the CIA will come in. The CIA has mastered medicines and spells. Men who carry weapons and kill will suffer from penis-shrinking until they stop.” [NOTE: A “penis-shrinking” accusation on market day in W. Africa could bring the accuser a death penalty; the public accusation causes panic which robber gangs use to grab cash boxes.] “If you do not behave, Uganda will be made a Category IV US Territory. We will send in the FBI. The FBI will stop the violence and they will stop all marriages until one person is a Hutu and the other person is a Tutsi so this evil killing will never happen again.”
Finding a civilian mob on the ground, broadcast the message. If they do not change to peaceful demeanor, fire a belt of blanks at them in a machine-gun. If that fails, fire a belt of all-tracer rounds to urge non-aggressive behavior.
The message should be enough to encourage everyone to change what they are doing to something better. Keep Uganda out of the US Commonwealth? Fine. Objecting nations then must step in and help. And surely there must be some way to broadcast on local radio frequencies.
The article merely states the truth: nearly a million died most horrible deaths in Rwanda as those with the power to stop it did nothing. Indeed, America and Europe don’t have the resources to police every corner of the world, but letting horror happen without consequence only assures that more horror will happen. Troops do not have to march off everywhere in a world where satellites, drones, cell phones and social media enable the world to see what is happening nearly everywhere. The only thing that will truly civilize the world, and that can do so in this era where everyone is watching and communicating, is the notion that the most powerful actors might have a sense of decency that cannot abide wholesale murder. The author of the article has her values and her arguments all in their right places. Her general attitude is called civilization. Those who argue against helping in places like Rwanda must ask themselves if they would still argue against the slaughter of, say, the people of Scotland or Denmark. And as for Rwanda being “their own problem,” the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu is not a difference of race, religion, language or custom. It is an artificial distinction imposed by the Belgian colonists as a way to divide and rule.
Look Syria has lots of American blood on its hands. If there was ever a regime deserving of a visit from the USAF it is Syria.
Our interests are global- we rely on a global economy and were are the foremost protector of open skies and sea lanes. If you want the world to be one big Somalia pirate base, just do nothing. I like the notion that dictators and the genocidally minded look up at the sky and fear us. I think they don’t fear us enough.
I think we can and should take advantage of global air superiority and, when some one starts a genocide, we bomb them. If only for the selfish reason that one day these people might buy coca cola and use Microsoft windows software. We can live in a world of pure barbarism or do something about it. My people, the Jews, would have wept with joy if the allies had bombed Auschwitz. Washington never imagined we would be the world’s sole hyper power, but he would want our nation to stand for principle and utterly destroy evil. If your neighbor were being killed, would you do nothing? Shall we be the worlds bystander and just watch and say sucks to be you?
We don’t have to put boots on the ground, we just have to put a few JDAMS in the right places at the right time. Once there was a tall Arab running around Afghanistan calling for genocide, bill Clinton chickened out even though that man wanted to do genocide in the USA- we got 911.
Juste remember this the world is only as safe and moral as we, in this country, make it.
Americans might volunteer for any number of good works around the globe, and I don’t think we should prevent that. But to compel our soldiers to be put in harm’s way without an American interest is just wrong, right down to the root.
Analogy: A public school eighth-grade teacher, if she hears the dam has burst and there is need of healthy bodies to pile up sandbags, might legitimately compel (as well as she is able) her students to the area, even at some risk to themselves, because the community is at risk and they are part of the community. She can put them into danger for a cause in which they have an interest. But she cannot compel them to go downtown to give mittens and food to the homeless in the winter, worthy an endeavor as that is, because that risk is for an elective value.
Any American might decide that his mission in life is to Do Good. But that cannot be the mission of government. Acting in our own self-interest is not a selfishness; sending others into harms way because of our moral preferences would be the selfish act.
Related but separate is the idea that America might want to sign on to stopping certain acts wherever they arise, reasoning that this is in our self-interest in and of itself. Genocide might be offered as a possible example. It would be a hard sell to the American people – to me, certainly – but one can at least conceive of an argument that says “we stop this in its tracks on general principle because it always costs us in the end otherwise.” No one seems to put it that way, however. Such ideas are sold as a nobility and kindness.