Clicking on banner ads enables JWR to constantly improve
Jewish World Review April 19, 2004/ 29 Nissan, 5763

Mark Steyn

Mark Steyn
JWR's Pundits
World Editorial
Cartoon Showcase

Mallard Fillmore

Michael Barone
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Don Feder
Suzanne Fields
James Glassman
Paul Greenberg
Bob Greene
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Marianne Jennings
Michael Kelly
Mort Kondracke
Ch. Krauthammer
Lawrence Kudlow
Dr. Laura
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Chris Matthews
Michael Medved
MUGGER
Wes Pruden
Sam Schulman
Amity Shlaes
Roger Simon
Tony Snow
Thomas Sowell
Cal Thomas
Jonathan S. Tobin
Ben Wattenberg
George Will
Bruce Williams
Walter Williams
Mort Zuckerman

Consumer Reports


Clarke apologizes, but not for everything

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
How about that Richard Clarke! Hard to beat that dramatic apology to the American people for the administration's failure to prevent 9/11: ''Your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you.''

Thanks for that, big guy. But, if you want an example of a president doing nothing to prevent not thousands but the best part of a million deaths, how about the Rwandan genocide? Remember that? It was exactly a decade ago, and the media commemorations so far are, to say the least, low-key. The editors of the Economist wonder, ''How many people can name any of the perpetrators?'' I'd say it's more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? Come on, take a guess, without looking it up.

If there's a point to the U.N., which some of us doubt, it should surely be for the likes of Rwanda. An irrelevant basket case state (even by African standards) will never be a legitimate national interest for any great power. To America, Britain, France, Russia and China, it makes no great difference who's running Rwanda, or even whether there is a Rwanda: If those Hutu and Tutsi mutually hacked each other into extinction, it's their problem. But the U.N. is supposed to represent a global will, a moral purpose beyond crude hard-power calculations. Instead, born in the wake of one genocide, it sat by and idly watched another unfold, so serenely complacent it couldn't even rouse itself to jam the state radio station, through which the ruling thugs urged their teenage hackers on in public service messages pointing out ''the graves are not yet full.'' So the killing continued, until some 800,000 were dead.

Bill Clinton felt their pain. Retrospectively. In 1998, on his Grand Apology Tour of Africa, a whirlwind tour of whirlwind apologies for slavery, the Cold War, you name it, he touched down in Kigali and apologized for the Rwandan genocide. ''When you look at those children who greeted us,'' he said, biting his lip, as is his wont, ''how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children?''

Alas, the president had precisely identified the problem. In April 1994, when the Hutu genocidaires looked at the children who greeted them in the Tutsi villages, that's exactly what they thought: They didn't want those Tutsi children to have a chance to have their own children. So the question is: When a bunch of killers refuse to subscribe to multiculti mumbo-jumbo, what do you do?

''All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices,'' continued Bill in his apology aria, ''who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.''

Au contraire, he appreciated it all too fully. That's why, during the bloodbath, Clinton administration officials were specifically instructed not to use the word ''genocide'' lest it provoke public pressure to do something. Documents made public confirm that U.S. officials knew within the first few days that a ''final solution'' to eliminate all Tutsis was under way.

General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the 2,500 U.N. peacekeepers, said he could prevent the killing if he had 5,000 men. Instead, the Clinton administration blocked him from taking any action and got the blue helmets to pull out. The U.N. has to learn, said Clinton, ''when to say no.'' There weren't people like him all over the world sitting in offices. There was him, sitting in his office, the Pain-Feeler-In-Chief kissing off half-a-million nobodies: Toot-Toot, Tutsis, goodbye!


Donate to JWR


It's a tenable position to feel America has no interest in preventing one bunch of Africans slaughtering another bunch of Africans. But it requires especial reserves of cynicism and contempt to seek approval for feeling bad about it four years later. Whether or not the Bush administration could ever have put together a few random clues — an uptick in Arab men taking flight-school training, etc. — in time to prevent what happened on Sept. 11, Bill Clinton knew about Rwanda and chose to do nothing.

Why was this? Well, Somalia, of course. When 10 Belgian peacekeepers were hacked to pieces in Rwanda, it reminded the administration of those 18 U.S. servicemen in Mogadishu. As Samantha Power writes in her book A Problem From Hell: ''The news from Rwanda only confirmed a deep skepticism about the viability of UN deployments. Clarke believed that another U.N. failure could doom relations between Congress and the United Nations. He also sought to shield the president from congressional and public criticism.''

What was that name again? ''Clarke''? Who's that?

Turns out it's Mister Apology himself, Richard Clarke. He was the guy in charge of Rwandan policy for the Clinton team and, as far as I can tell, unlike the Pain-Feeler, he feels not even a twinge of pro forma remorse. As we know, regrets, he's had a few. But this isn't one of them. ''It is not always the United States that has to answer the 911 call,'' Clarke said. ''It is not always the United States that has to be the world's policeman.'' Correct. But in this instance, Clarke and Clinton went further and scuttled a U.N. mission that had already answered the 911 call. Nothing the supposedly ''unilateral'' Bush team has done damaged the U.N. and its credibility as much as the Clinton-Clarke team did during the Rwandan bloodbath. And whenever a local bully gets away with it, it emboldens others.

By all accounts, Clarke is a difficult man to work with. He reminds me of that comic classic on British history, 1066 And All That, with its battles between Royalists — ''wrong but romantic'' — and Roundheads — ''right but repulsive.'' In much of his Clinton-era approach to terrorism, Clarke seems to have been ''right but repulsive,'' which is why nothing got done; in his more fanciful moments, he was ''wrong but romantic.'' But in his present incarnation he's wrong and repulsive. He seems to have learned from his old boss, who's always preferred to apologize for the mistakes of others rather than his own: Shortly after 9/11, Bill Clinton apologized for the Crusades.

By Sept. 11, Clarke was far removed from the decision-making process on Afghanistan, al-Qaida and beyond. He has no more authority to apologize for the events of that day than I do.

But he bears a lot of responsibility for Rwanda. Any chance of an apology for that?

Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.

JWR contributor Mark Steyn is North American Editor of The (London) Spectator and the author, most recently, of "The Face of the Tiger," a new book on the world post-Sept. 11. (Sales help fund JWR). Comment by clicking here.

04/11/04: Don't let Iraq's tempest in a teacup rattle you
04/05/04: The flip-flopper hip-hopper: John Kerry gets down — and not just his poll numbers
03/25/04: We tried appeasement once before
03/16/04: The Spanish dishonored their dead
03/10/04: Beware of the fruitcakes in government
03/01/04: It's the war, stupid
02/23/04: So which would America rather have: Pretty Boy or Long Face?
02/17/04: The Default Democrat from another world
02/10/04: Kerry won't scare any of the big beasts
02/02/04: The Kerry biography: He's risen without trace
01/26/04: Mad Dr. Dean jolts Kerry campaign to life
01/21/04: Undoing the party herd
01/13/04: llIegals the political 'untouchables'
01/05/04: Don't leave Saddam trial to the 'jet set'
12/30/03: Doers and disparagers
12/23/03: Spates of denial
12/16/03: Defiant? He's a Ba'athist who won't bath
12/10/03: Rummy speaks the truth, not gobbledygook
12/02/03: War on terror can't stop with Iraq
11/24/03: It's not Vietnam and Bush is no Kennedy
11/12/03: There is a Cold War between the US and the EU
10/28/03: Muslim paranoia: Enemies made us impotent!

10/28/03:The CIA scandal is important not because it put an agent's life at risk — it didn't — but because it shows that US Intelligence is either obstructive or inept
10/08/03: Palestinian death cult
09/29/03: Bring on the capitalists
09/22/03: Here comes General Clark, his policies will follow shortly
09/17/03: Don't wait for government protection
09/11/03: Predators aren't looking for peace
09/02/03: This is Hillary's moment — You go, girl!
08/29/03: There are now calls for greater UN involvement in Iraq. That’s the last thing the country needs
08/26/03: There's only one hyperpower — so everything is our fault
08/04/03: The White Man's Burden
07/29/03: Bill Clinton got this right
06/25/03: It's Mullah time!
05/07/03: What counts is what a guy does when he's not talking
04/30/03: It's named UNSCAM for a very good reason!
04/14/03: Movers and shakers have moved on to the next 'disaster'
03/25/03: Give Saddam credit
03/18/03: 'Eurabia' will have to look after herself
02/27/03: Death wish
02/19/03: The curtain will come down on the peaceniks
02/10/03: Let's quit the UN
02/03/03: Columbia reality-check
01/29/03: Go forth and multiply
01/09/03: America's fake identity crisis
12/31/02: GOP underperforms, but Dems are laughable
11/26/02: A bombing pause --- for 12 months!?
10/30/02: Stop making excuses for Muslim extremists
09/27/02: The more inventively you try to ''explain'' the Islamist psychosis as a rational phenomenon to be accommodated, the more you risk sounding just as nutty as them
08/23/02: Battered Westerner Syndrome inflicted by myopic Muslim defenders
08/09/02: Friends in low places
08/02/02: Armageddon out of here
07/26/02: Enjoy the ''scandal'' while you can, lads
07/16/02: Arafat is toast; Bush knows it --- so why doesn't the rest of the world?
07/10/02: Hey, FBI: So, denial really is a river in Egypt!
06/20/02: A fight to the finish
06/11/02: Rock, royalty a good match
05/31/02: Unless we change our ways ... the world faces a future where things look pretty darn good
05/24/02: Sweet land of liberty: Britain and Europe have free governments, but only in the US are the people truly free
05/14/02: Extreme hypocrisy in the pursuit of 'peace' is ...
05/10/02: The home office of extremism
05/01/02 Slipping down the Eurinal of history: France, the joke is on you
04/23/02 It's time to snap out of Arab fantasy land
04/16/02 Mideast war exposes 'ugly Europeans'
04/09/02 Arafat has begun his countdown to oblivion. Now it's time to crush the Palestinian uprising
03/27/02 The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug
03/20/02 Grand convocation of the weird

© 2004, Mark Steyn