HOW DO YOU SPELL OFFENSIVE
By Cori Dauber
<font size=4>
It is almost beyond my belief that Bill Clinton has the nerve to ever speak or write the word "Rwanda" in public. If I were him with that on my conscience, I'd keep my head down, my mouth shut, and hope beyond hope that nobody ever brought the subject up again. But that isn't Clinton's style, and so we are treated to this parody of an op-ed in today's WaPo.<font size=3> washingtonpost.com
<font size=4>
It is an outrage.
The failure to intervene in Rwanda is a moral stain on this country's history, but it is most of all a stain on the legacy of Bill Clinton and Kofi Annon, the men who stood up, not to be counted, but to say "no."
He has the nerve to quote himself saying that we did not
call genocide by it's true name, but it is well known that
instructions were given by a gun-shy White House,
unwilling after to Somalia to intervene in yet another
African country, that the "g" word was not to be spoken by
any White House staffer. Because the United States is
party to various conventions that create an affirmative
obligation to act, had we admitted the obvious we would
have been committed.
He has the nerve to speak of better intelligence when it is a matter of the historical record that his White House knew God damn good and well what was happening in plenty of time to effect events and save perhaps 200,000 lives. Two. Hundred. Thousand. Lives. Even this book, which is sold as the definitive account of how intervention wouldn't have worked, is actually an account of how we could probably have saved "only" 125,000. And that's what the hardline position says.
Bill Clinton should go back to partying with Bono, if this is the alternative.
Update: Samantha Power, perhaps the nation's leading expert on genocide, has more substantive things to say in the Times. And, as she points out, wringing our hands over Rwanda is fine, but maybe we should do something about the ongoing genocide in Sudan instead of just visiting museums to those already dead. |
