Rwanda, Clinton, and Responsibility
These documents are worth seeing, the information is vital knowledge, but this is better categorized as confirmation of what we knew and suspected rather than as being truly new information. Indeed, in both Philip Gourevitch's masterful reportage"We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," and to a lesser degree in Bill Berkeley's"The Graves Are Not Yet Full" Clinton complicity rings out loud and clear. The same is true in many other academic and scholarly sources.
Equally important is what this information tells us about the foreign policy that we ought to pursue. Since 1994 I have long argued that we failed egregiously in not intervening in Rwanda. It is, to my mind, the largest failure of the Clinton Presidency. Of course had Clinton attempted to engage in Rwanda, to commit the relatively few resources it would have taken to prevent the death of nearly a million civilians, many Republicans would have fought him, brandishing him an idealist and sneeringly deriding a"human rights approach" to foreign policy. So neither party should take these new revelations as affirmation of their virtue and the other side's vice.
What does this mean for us in the here and now? Well, it makes me ask of those who would deny our right to engage in either preemptive or unilateral foreign policy if Rwanda forces them to reconsider. Any engagement in Rwanda in 1993-1994 would have been preemptive. There is not much doubt about that. Further, long before worrying about a coalition, Clinton should have been planning to act. If other nations went along, great. If not, well, we had a responsibility that transcended getting the permission of Saudi Arabia, Iran, France, Russia, or even Australia and the British.
In other words, take away the increasingly obnoxious responses of the Bush Administration and the perceived arrogance of their conduct, and do all of the critics of the war really oppose preemption and unilateralism? Would they not have been willing to intervene and go it alone to prevent the murders of hundreds of thousands?