Sunday, March 16, 2003

[2:53 PM] What was George W. Bush talking about today?I'm not speaking of Iraq—I tune out when he repeats the same four talking points over and over again (gassed his own people; 12 years to disarm, etc.). In the press conference in the Azores, Bush admonished the U.N. “And the U.N. must mean something. Remember Rwanda or Kosovo. The U.N. didn't do its job. And we hope tomorrow the U.N. will do its job.”

Huh? Rwanda? (this from the anti-intervention president). Perhaps he mixed up abbreviations and meant U.S. instead of U.N. Wasn’t it the U.S. that opposed any action in Rwanda? Wasn’t it the U.S. government (sadly during the Clinton administration) that was caught up arguing about whether to use the “g-word” as Samantha Power wrote in her book A Problem from Hell; America in the Age of Genocide. Maybe GWB should go back and read the Rwanda chapter. Here are some excerpts

National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, who happened to know Africa, recalls “I was obsessed with Haiti and Bosnia during that period, so Rwanda was…a ‘sideshow,’ but not even a sideshow—a no-show.”

Belgium did not want to leave ignominiously, [after the killing of 14 of its soldiers] by itself. Warren Christopher agreed to back Belgian requests for a full UN exit. Policy over the next month or so can be described simply: no U.S. military intervention, robust demands for a withdrawal of all [UN] forces, and no support for a new UN mission that would challenge the killers.

On April 15 Secretary [of State] Christopher sent Ambassador Albright at the UN one of the most forceful documents produced in the entire three months of the genocide. Christopher’s cable instructed Albright to demand a full UN withdrawal…Christopher wrote that there was “insufficient justification” to retain a UN presence…

If anything Bush should have used the Rwandan argument as one that bolsters the case for unilateral action—a point I made in the essay in the Humanist (see left column). And it would offer the double whammy of criticizing the Clinton administration at the same time. But I suppose when you’re as fixated on war as GWB is, there’s no time to get all your facts straight.

# posted 2:58 PM