That’s a good one, xtisme. Ever thought of doing stand-up? 
Interesting to see pre-9/11 Afghanistan and pre-war Rwanda in the same thread. Consider: The sheer nastiness of the Taliban, and their harboring of terrorists to boot, was well known for years before the war. It certainly got even more attention in the US press than anything going on in sub-Saharan Africa. I doubt you could find any more than a handful of Americans who had the slightest clue that there was a tribal war in the offing in Rwanda - hell, only the hardcore geography boffins and the Jane Goodall fans ever *heard * of the place.
So, a miltary action for humanitarian reasons, that we now generally accept after the fact should have been tried in Rwanda, would have been far more doable in Afghanistan, wouldn’t it? But we didn’t do that until forced to by 9/11, and even then that effort has been half-hearted and thoroughly hypocritical. That failure to act isn’t a failure of intelligence or a misuse or nonuse of it by any government; it was a policy decision derived from our own, oh, let’s call it “willingness to accept it”. If it isn’t fair to blame any President for not going into Afghanistan before 9/11, it is even less fair to blame one for not going into Rwanda.
I agree that comparing the two situations is completely meaningless. Clinton, as president, had ZERO responsibility for what went on in Rwanda except inasmuch as it affected the security of the US. I think we can all agree that the threat to the security of the US was as close to ZERO as can be.
I’m not even sure the Rwandan situation was a failure of the UN. In as much as it was an internal conflict, the UN should stay out. If it threatened to spill over into other countries (and I don’t remember if it did or not), then the UN should step in.
I KNEW you’d love it. 
Actually I did skim Clark’s book. And I am not argueing with you that the Prez et al didn’t take the situation that presented itself and use it to do something they wanted to do. I’m merely saying I’m unconvinced that the invasion of Iraq would have happened or was planned prior to 9/11. It was more like a happy wish that was granted by circumstances. I have seen the PNAC website, but I think, again, this was wishful thinking without any real expectation that it would ever really happen. I just don’t see any way that Bush (or really anyone else) could have gotten the country behind them (and certainly not congress) without something like 9/11 happening. And at the same time, I don’t believe that Bush PLANNED for 9/11, knew it was coming, wanted it, etc. That way lies the conspircy theory madness I don’t want to dip a toe into.
My own feeling is that without 9/11 there would have been no invasion of Iraq…and nothing except maybe a few cruise missiles tossed into Afghanistan. Bush’s presidency would have been all about domestic policy and the economy…a totally dull and forgettable period of time IMO. We’ll never know, but thats my take on it.
I agree with you that the OP would have been more interesting if an actual comparison would have been done. Maybe you should do an OP sometime based on your thoughts.
-XT
Interesting. I’m curious, in light of what you’ve just said, what your take is on the current contention by the Bush Administration that Iraq is a war of “liberation”. It seems to me that if Iraq was dependent on 9/11 happening, then it can’t really be about liberating the Iraqis, because the liberation issue would have existed with or without 9/11.
But we don’t all accept that something should have been tried in Rwanda. Hindsight and collective guilt are powerful memes, but they don’t prove that we could have done anything in Rwanda other than throw away the lives of peacekeepers propping up an intolerable status quo. There’s a lot of talk today about our lack of an exit strategy for Iraq, but how would we ever have devised one for Rwanda?
More likely not, I agree. But we get reminded periodically, and have just been reminded again, how easy it is to whip up war fever if you want a war. “Weapons of mass destruction hidden and ready to use on us in 45 minutes!” “Torture and rape cells!” “He gassed his own people!” Sotto voce: [sub]“There’s oil fields we can grab for ourselves, in the national interest!”[/sub] You know the list, even if you take 9/11 or even “He sponsors global terrorism!” off of it. And, much too late, the misuse/nonuse/filtering/fabrication of the intelligence behind it would still be inescapable.
Don’t discount the fervor and power at the time of the Cheney/Perle/Wolfowitz/Rice cabal, or the ineffectiveness of the Powell/Clarke realists (the pre-UN Powell, that is). They’d had only 7 months, and I am not nearly as confident as you that they wouldn’t have been able to get Bush to go along with that agenda.
To those of you blaming the UN for Rwanda, don’t forget who is still the major power in that organization. Given the US’s dominant influence as well as its veto power, it is not easy for the UN to do anything that the US refuses to do. Yes, the same moral failings and simple miscalculations went on in both Washington and in New York, but to a large degree they overlapped.
I didn’t say “all of us”, I said “generally”. It cannot ever be resolved what should have been done.
As for what could have been done, how about more of what *was * done? The expeditionary forces that went there, mainly French, Belgian, and Canadian IIRC, were small but still powerful enough to effectively separate the Hutus and Tutsis and stanch the bloodshed. Separation, even partition, is the only proven strategy I know of to stop ethnic civil wars, i.e. India (1948), Bosnia, Lebanon, perhaps even Ireland is an example. There are UN troops in Bosnia and Lebanon today, from various countries, enforcing buffer zones of varying formality but with equal effectiveness at preventing killings, and that’s sadly as much as you can often hope to accomplish.
I don’t see how it’s unreasonable to think that a lot more troops a lot earlier would have meant a lot fewer severed limbs washing ashore on Lake Victoria. The same could be said of East Timor or Liberia or Sierra Leone too, while we’re at it.
Well, I thought you knew my feelings on this. I NEVER thought it was a war of ‘liberation’. It was a way for the US to project power into the ME, to (possibly) cow the region (and even wider areas) to forstall other attacks, to (by force of arms) create a potential democracy (and in the fantasies of the Administration) another ‘ally’ similar to Israel in the region, and a place to base US forces for the possibility they’d be needed in a strategically vital region. Those are the MAIN reasons I think the Iraq war happened. As to what the Administration might or might not have said…I could care less. I stopped listening to ANY Administrations words years ago, and simply started looking for the underlying links…reading between the lines I suppose you would say.
The use of the word ‘liberation’ by the Administration was to justify our actions for public consumption…the masses LOVE this kind of tripe, IMO. Like all such lies, its wrapped in a shred of truth…namely Saddam WAS pretty monsterous, and if you look at it in a certain way, the Iraqi people WERE liberated from him. However, only a fool would think this was the only, or even the main reason behind what the Administration did. It wasn’t even a good side show IMO, but simply something for public consumption…IMO.
-XT
O.K., thanks XT. No, I didn’t remember you giving that view before. I’m sure you did, but I haven’t been able to read everything you’re written. You are rather prolific, you know.
I say that Clinton’s Rwanda policy was not a failure, but rather a success, since it probably saved lives. In look at history since the end of WWII, most attempts by the United States to screw around in third world countries have only made the situation worse. Take Vietnam. We went in to protect the people of south Vietnam from the communist government that they themselves had elected. Ten years later we were killing civilian populations in Laos and Cambodia. Take Guatemala. Or El Salvador. Or Chile. Hell, our support for those nice fellows in Afghanistan who were fighting the Soviets in the 80’s didn’t do much for the human rights situation there. Nor did the weapons we sent to that guy in Iraq during his dust-up with Iran.
So if we had sent troops into Rwanda, as likely as not we would have prolonged the fighting beyond when it lasted. And maybe interrupted local farming more, leading to starvation. And maybe caused the fighting to spill over into neighboring countries (Burundi also had high tensions between ethnic groups at the time.)
By the way, I don’t blame Bush for a major intelligence failure relating to 9/11 either. My attitude is that if person X wasn’t actively demanding that more attention be paid to terrorism prior to the attacks, then X has no right to criticize Y for not devoting enough effort to fighting terrorism prior to 9/11. Government responds to public pressure. There was no public pressure to devote more resources to protecting us from Al Queda before 9/11.
So are you saying that the president has no responsibility to protect the country from attack, unless the voting public demands a specific course of action? And how would the voters have known about such things as memos to the president titled “Bin Laden determined to attack in U.S.”, since those things weren’t available for public consumption? For Pete’s sake, that’s like if I’m standing next to you and see a piano about to fall on your head, and I don’t say anything because you didn’t tell me to.
Cute metaphor, but not a valid one. Prior to 9/11 the United States government was already doing plenty to combat terrorism. It just wasn’t enough, or rather wasn’t well enough organized. But if Bush during the first eight months of his presidency (or Clinton at any time during his presidency) had stood up and announced he was creating an entirely new federal department, ramping up the budgets for numerous federal agencies, bringing airline security under government control, and so forth, he would immediately have been accused of excessive spending, promoting unnecessary bureaucracy, and trying to scare people with phantom threats of terrorism. As for presidential briefs and all that jazz, it’s easy to remember the ones that are accurate and easy to forget that the government receives tons of warning that eventually prove not to be accurate at all.
Such as?
If it was Americans doing the killing, or having ANYTHING to do with the killing, you might have something resembling a point.
These kinds of statements make me sad. It shows that sometimes people genuinely don’t care about the suffering of others. I’m not trying to sound like Sally Struthers here, but let’s face it, 800,000 people died in Rwanda. Think about that. That’s a mid-sized city, wiped out. 800,000 people, butchered for nothing more than an accident of birth. Not since the Holocaust have so many people been killed in so short a time. And in response to this people can actually say “not my problem”? It’s sickening to see that. Human beings are human beings, all have the same rights, and when someone tries to take those rights away, it is the moral and ethical duty of the entire assembly of nations to stand up for those people.
Of course, I know that it’s not possible to rush off to fix every problem in the world, but something, anything could have been done in Rwanda, and nothing was. This wasn’t just a case of not having the time or resources, it was a case of not caring enough. Because of that callousness from the global community 800,000 people were hacked to bits. I have seen images from the slaughter, images that I will never forget. I’ve seen soldiers break down, peacekeepers who are trained warriors who are now emotional basket cases because they could do nothing but stand by and watch. When you see hundreds of little bodies of massacred children lined up, it’s hard to say “not my problem”.
So, yes, Rwanda was a UN failure. If the UN has a place in Cyprus, it does in Rwanda. If the UN has a place in Kosovo, it does in Rwanda (or did, anyway). That’s what the UN is all about, living globally in peace. And I’m aware of the US’s ppower at the UN, but I still think the blame is global, not just American for the Rwandan disaster.
Oh please. Defending Evil Captor here - he was responding to that inane comment by Zagadka, where Zagadka tried to insinuate that if one mentions the fact that self-defense and unilateral attack are not directly comparable, that one is somehow an ogre who is insensitive to the plight of others. As tempting as it might be to want to rush in and start bombing every country that abuses its people, the fact is that we would have to take over about 1/2 the world to do that. It’s not as cut & dried as you make it out to be. Or are you in favor of invading China, Africa, North Korea, Libya, Iran, etc.? You just can’t make blanket statements to the effect that it’s always right to start bombing another country. There are always considerations to be made before starting a war. Military action doesn’t always have the beneficial result we want it to have. Sometimes things end up worse. The international community has a reluctance to engaging in unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and that’s a good thing. Acknowledging that is not “sad”.