Stop Genocide in Rwanda and Sudan, but not Iraq

Intervention in Rwanda. Yes. Intervention in Sudan. Yes.

Intervention in Iraq. No. We must pull out now.

On March 25th, 1998, former President Bill Clinton told Rwandans that "the international community had failed to act to prevent the country's genocide in 1994." He continued:

"All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror," Clinton told the audience of several hundred assembled, including many survivors of the genocide.

"Genocide can occur anywhere. It is not an African phenomenon. We must have global vigilance. And never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence," Clinton said.

Samantha Power wrote in Bystanders to Genocide:

...in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

It gets worse. Power continues:

In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

Does this sound familiar? Troop pullouts? Cutting funds? Wait, there are more parallels:

The signs of militarization in Rwanda were so widespread that even without much of an intelligence-gathering capacity, Dallaire was able to learn of the extremists' sinister intentions. In January of 1994 an anonymous Hutu informant, said to be high up in the inner circles of the Rwandan government, had come forward to describe the rapid arming and training of local militias.

Rapid arming and training of local militias? The name Moqtada al Sadr comes to mind. Power continues, invoking the U.S. retreat from Somalia after the death of eighteen Americans:

On receiving word of these events, President Clinton cut short a trip to California and convened an urgent crisis-management meeting at the White House. When an aide began recapping the situation, an angry President interrupted him. "Cut the bullshit," Clinton snapped. "Let's work this out." "Work it out" meant walk out. Republican Congressional pressure was intense. Clinton appeared on American television the next day, called off the manhunt for Aideed, temporarily reinforced the troop presence, and announced that all U.S. forces would be home within six months. The Pentagon leadership concluded that peacekeeping in Africa meant trouble and that neither the White House nor Congress would stand by it when the chips were down.

Power goes on to outline the series of American efforts to evacuate and avoid the conflict through ignorance, willful dismissal, or carelessness in the ensuing weeks and months. Upon the evacuation of U.S. personnel from Rwanda, Bill Clinton had this response:

In the three days during which some 4,000 foreigners were evacuated, about 20,000 Rwandans were killed. After the American evacuees were safely out and the U.S. embassy had been closed, Bill and Hillary Clinton visited the people who had manned the emergency-operations room at the State Department and offered congratulations on a "job well done."

As for when the U.S. knew there was genocide:

both the testimony of U.S. officials who worked the issue day to day and the declassified documents indicate that plenty was known about the killers' intentions.

and

From April 8 onward media coverage featured eyewitness accounts describing the widespread targeting of Tutsi and the corpses piling up on Kigali's streets. American reporters relayed stories of missionaries and embassy officials who had been unable to save their Rwandan friends and neighbors from death.

The UN General on the ground, Romeo Dallaire, begged for more troops:

When the killing began, Romeo Dallaire expected and appealed for reinforcements. Within hours of the plane crash he had cabled UN headquarters in New York: "Give me the means and I can do more."

Despite the small numbers, some UN peacekeepers exemplified incredible courage:

Although some soldiers hunkered down, terrified, others scoured Kigali, rescuing Tutsi, and later established defensive positions in the city, opening their doors to the fortunate Tutsi who made it through roadblocks to reach them. One Senegalese captain saved a hundred or so lives single-handedly. Some 25,000 Rwandans eventually assembled at positions manned by UNAMIR personnel.

However, at UN headquarters, nothing but cowardice:

By coincidence Rwanda held one of the rotating seats on the Security Council at the time of the genocide. Neither the United States nor any other UN member state ever suggested that the representative of the genocidal government be expelled from the council. Nor did any Security Council country offer to provide safe haven to Rwandan refugees who escaped the carnage.

Rwanda was a Civil War. Is not Iraq?

Whatever the inevitable imperfections of U.S. intelligence early on, the reports from Rwanda were severe enough to distinguish Hutu killers from ordinary combatants in civil war.

France to the rescue. France!

It is not hard to conceive of how the United States might have done things differently. Ahead of the plane crash, as violence escalated, it could have agreed to Belgian pleas for UN reinforcements. Once the killing of thousands of Rwandans a day had begun, the President could have deployed U.S. troops to Rwanda. The United States could have joined Dallaire's beleaguered UNAMIR forces or, if it feared associating with shoddy UN peacekeeping, it could have intervened unilaterally with the Security Council's backing, as France eventually did in late June. The United States could also have acted without the UN's blessing, as it did five years later in Kosovo.

For his part, Bush has said:

"I don't like genocide," Bush said in January of 2000. "But I would not commit our troops."

In comparison to Bill Clinton's post-Rwanda contrition, Barack Obama has spoken out on Sudan. In the Los Angeles Times, Niall Ferguson wrote this past February of "Obama's muddled stance on foreign intervention. On one hand, he wants troops out of Iraq by next year. On the other, he believes the U.S. should ensure the world's security."

Ferguson continued to lay out an excellent case for Obama's Hypocrisy:

Take a look at Obama's arguments for a speedy U.S. withdrawal. Last month, he asserted that "redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve … political settlement between its warring factions." The key is "to give Iraqis their country back" because "no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war."

But Obama's claim that a U.S. withdrawal would somehow "pressure the Sunni and Shia to come to the table and find peace" is a fraud. Withdrawal is much more likely to lead to an escalation of the internecine conflict that is tearing Iraq apart. In a devastating 2006 paper for the Brookings Institution, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack pointed out that "the only thing standing between Iraq and a descent into a Lebanon- or Bosnia-like maelstrom is 135,000 American troops."

In fact, Iraq has already matched the level of violence witnessed in the Lebanese and Bosnian civil wars. And it could get much worse. If the U.S. pulls out, as Obama recommends, Byman and Pollack predict "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die."

Obama's call for rapid withdrawal from Iraq would make some sense if he were an isolationist. But he's not. His memoir-cum-manifesto, "The Audacity of Hope," insists that, out of both self-interest and altruism, the U.S. has no alternative but to "help make the world more secure." Looking back on the Rwandan genocide, he reflects that "an international show of force … might have stopped the slaughter."

Obama also has accused the Bush administration of doing too little to stop the murderous policies of the Sudanese government toward the people of Darfur. In an article in December 2005, he went so far as to urge the deployment of "a U.N.- or NATO-led force."

Wait a second. Here are two civil wars, each likely to spiral out of control. But in one (Sudan), Obama recommends intervention, while in the other (Iraq), he recommends military withdrawal. Am I missing something?

Hollywood & Obama on Darfur: Clooney, senators urge action on Darfur

The three urged more attention across the board -- by the United States, other nations and world institutions.

"What we cannot do is turn our heads and look away and hope that this will somehow disappear," Clooney said.

Are tens of thousands not dead in Iraq at the hands of vile Islamic extremists?

The crisis in western Sudan's Darfur region has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and the displacement of nearly 2 million people since February 2003, when people there began to rebel against state authority.

Amidst this backdrop - A history of world negligience in Rwanda and Sudan, that many American politicians and activists strive for the U.S. pullout of Iraq. To this, Christoper Hitchens responds: Rushing for the Exit

To say that "exit strategies" from Iraq have become the flavor of the month would be to exaggerate the situation to the point of absurdity. Exit strategies are not even the fall fashion. They are the regnant topic of conversation all across the political establishment and have been for some time.

By "some time," one need not ponder for very long what Hitchens implies. As stated, Rwanda and Sudan are clear examples of the consequences of inaction by countries that have the power to act. Hitchens then outlines the numerous Iraqi victories and successes:

I am glad that all previous demands for withdrawal or disengagement from Iraq were unheeded, because otherwise we would not be able to celebrate the arrest and trial of Saddam Hussein; the removal from the planet of his two sadistic kids and putative successors; the certified disarmament of a former WMD- and gangster-sponsoring rogue state; the recuperation of the marshes and their ecology and society; the introduction of a convertible currency; the autonomy of Iraqi Kurdistan (currently advertising for investors and tourists on American television); the killing of al-Qaida's most dangerous and wicked leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and many of his associates; the opening of dozens of newspapers and radio and TV stations; the holding of elections for an assembly and to approve a constitution; and the introduction of the idea of federal democracy as the only solution for Iraq short of outright partition and/or civil war. If this cause is now to be considered defeated, by the sheer staggering persistence in murder and sabotage of the clerico-fascist forces and the sectarian militias, then it will always count as a noble one.

Thousand of Iraqis have perished since the start of the Iraq war. The estimates range from 60,000 to the outlandish 300,000+ of many now discredited studies. On the face of it, the Sunni/Shi'ite Civil War and al Qaeda insurgency taking place in Iraq may not necessarily constitute genocide to some, although as Samantha Power noted, there is a fine line between diplomatic casuistry and the realities on the ground, which mere labels cannot transcend.

If we should have acted in Rwanda, as former President Bill Clinton has regrettably stated, then why not Iraq?

If we should now act in Sudan, as Senator Obama, George Clooney, and countless others have fervently demanded, then why not Iraq?

There can be only one answer to that question in my mind: Spite and Politics. Spite for the Bush administration's bold (and despised, ridiculed, criticized) lead into war, and Politics for the Democratic opportunists now pandering to their base on the backs of now and future dead Iraqi civilians.

If the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq, would not genocide ensue, if that is not what is taking place already? Does any logical, reasonable person honestly believe that Iraq's problems will disappear along with American troops?

That is fallacious reasoning at best. That is politics. That is spite.

And that is what is going on right now.