Scott,I agree 100% about ISIS.......they are a terrible organization, and the world should find a way to control them. They are on a discriminate killing rampage, especially against Christians. What do you think of our honorable John McCain cahooting with ISIS in this link?
http://madworldnews.com/video-john-mccains-whoops-moment-photographed-chilling-isis/
http://madworldnews.com/video-john-mccains-whoops-moment-photographed-chilling-isis/
Welcome Home DH!
Where do you find all these blogs and why do they all contain the word "news" in their titles? I gotta say on this one though it looks like John has egg on his face. We (the US) make a lot of mistakes (see below as Obama gets played by ISIS). We trained the PLO and they turned their guns on us. Yet we refuse to rearm the Peshmerga Kurds who fight ISIS and are now low on ammo because "legally" we have to go through Baghdad and you know al Maliki the sectarian crook is not going to send arms to the Kurds up North.
Where I agree with McCain is we (and the world community that I keep telling you does not exist, and that's a big problem) should have intervened at the beginning of Assad's slaughter of civilians before all these terrorists crossed the border and the Free Syrian Army was overrun with terrorists and people we did not know enough about. This was a head of State using air power to blow up civilian buildings with genocidal intent. And he used chemical weapons. Inexcusable. And he's still in power in one part of Syria and now ISIS has emerged from those battles to take over large swaths of Syria, Iraq and even some villages in Lebanon.
U.S. Trained ISIS At Secret Jordan Base In 2012
Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the German magazine’s report. The French foreign ministry and Britain’s foreign and defense ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
The Jordanian officials spoke to WND amid concern the sectarian violence in Iraq will spill over into their own country as well as into Syria.
ISIS previously posted a video on YouTube threatening to move on Jordan and “slaughter” King Abdullah, whom they view as an enemy of Islam.
WND reported last week that, according to Jordanian and Syrian regime sources, Saudi Arabia has been arming the ISIS and that the Saudis are a driving force in supporting the al-Qaida-linked group.
WND further reported that, according to a Shiite source in contact with a high official in the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Obama administration has been aware for two months that the al-Qaida-inspired group that has taken over two Iraqi cities and now is threatening Baghdad also was training fighters in Turkey.
The source told WND that at least one of the training camps of the group Iraq of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria, the ISIS, is in the vicinity of Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey, where American personnel and equipment are located.
He called Obama “an accomplice” in the attacks that are threatening the Maliki government the U.S. helped establish through the Iraq war.
The source said that after training in Turkey, thousands of ISIS fighters went to Iraq by way of Syria to join the effort to establish an Islamic caliphate subject to strict Islamic law, or Shariah.
Where do you find all these blogs and why do they all contain the word "news" in their titles? I gotta say on this one though it looks like John has egg on his face. We (the US) make a lot of mistakes (see below as Obama gets played by ISIS). We trained the PLO and they turned their guns on us. Yet we refuse to rearm the Peshmerga Kurds who fight ISIS and are now low on ammo because "legally" we have to go through Baghdad and you know al Maliki the sectarian crook is not going to send arms to the Kurds up North.
Where I agree with McCain is we (and the world community that I keep telling you does not exist, and that's a big problem) should have intervened at the beginning of Assad's slaughter of civilians before all these terrorists crossed the border and the Free Syrian Army was overrun with terrorists and people we did not know enough about. This was a head of State using air power to blow up civilian buildings with genocidal intent. And he used chemical weapons. Inexcusable. And he's still in power in one part of Syria and now ISIS has emerged from those battles to take over large swaths of Syria, Iraq and even some villages in Lebanon.
U.S. Trained ISIS At Secret Jordan Base In 2012
Members of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country’s northern desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain’s Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the German magazine’s report. The French foreign ministry and Britain’s foreign and defense ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
The Jordanian officials spoke to WND amid concern the sectarian violence in Iraq will spill over into their own country as well as into Syria.
ISIS previously posted a video on YouTube threatening to move on Jordan and “slaughter” King Abdullah, whom they view as an enemy of Islam.
WND reported last week that, according to Jordanian and Syrian regime sources, Saudi Arabia has been arming the ISIS and that the Saudis are a driving force in supporting the al-Qaida-linked group.
WND further reported that, according to a Shiite source in contact with a high official in the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the Obama administration has been aware for two months that the al-Qaida-inspired group that has taken over two Iraqi cities and now is threatening Baghdad also was training fighters in Turkey.
The source told WND that at least one of the training camps of the group Iraq of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Syria, the ISIS, is in the vicinity of Incirlik Air Base near Adana, Turkey, where American personnel and equipment are located.
He called Obama “an accomplice” in the attacks that are threatening the Maliki government the U.S. helped establish through the Iraq war.
The source said that after training in Turkey, thousands of ISIS fighters went to Iraq by way of Syria to join the effort to establish an Islamic caliphate subject to strict Islamic law, or Shariah.
McCain dubbed 'enemy' and 'crusader' by ISIS terrorists
AZ/DC
Dan Nowicki, The Republic | azcentral.com 3:22 p.m. MST July 28, 2014
(Photo: Republic file photo)
The deadly terror organization the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, commonly known as ISIS or ISIL, prominently quotes "crusader" Sen. John McCain in the latest issue of its propaganda magazine.
In a feature titled "In The Words of The Enemy," the ISIS magazine Dabiq says McCain, R-Ariz., went to the Senate floor on June 12 "to rant irritably about the victories the Islamic State was achieving in Iraq." The magazine quoted McCain's floor statement at length.
In a written statement, McCain called the distinction "a true badge of honor" and compared it to Russian President Vladimir Putin's sanction of him earlier this year.
"When first you get sanctioned by Vladimir Putin and now that ISIL says that I'm the worst of the worst, I'm deeply honored," McCain said Monday in an interview with The Arizona Republic. "When I get that kind of reaction, it means that they think I'm a problem. And I want to be a problem to them. I've been told on several occasions that they view me as their greatest enemy."
ISIS is considered a dangerous terrorist threat by U.S. officials. Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this month told ABC News that the ISIS threat is "more frightening than anything I think I've seen as attorney general." (Shit I didn't even know that guy was awake - SL)
McCain told The Republic he doesn't feel personally threatened by either the attention from ISIS or from Putin.
"There's an old saying that you know people by their enemies -- well, I hope that that's true," McCain said. "I hope that the North Korean guy is next."
AZ/DC
(Photo: Republic file photo)
The deadly terror organization the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, commonly known as ISIS or ISIL, prominently quotes "crusader" Sen. John McCain in the latest issue of its propaganda magazine.
In a feature titled "In The Words of The Enemy," the ISIS magazine Dabiq says McCain, R-Ariz., went to the Senate floor on June 12 "to rant irritably about the victories the Islamic State was achieving in Iraq." The magazine quoted McCain's floor statement at length.
In a written statement, McCain called the distinction "a true badge of honor" and compared it to Russian President Vladimir Putin's sanction of him earlier this year.
"When first you get sanctioned by Vladimir Putin and now that ISIL says that I'm the worst of the worst, I'm deeply honored," McCain said Monday in an interview with The Arizona Republic. "When I get that kind of reaction, it means that they think I'm a problem. And I want to be a problem to them. I've been told on several occasions that they view me as their greatest enemy."
ISIS is considered a dangerous terrorist threat by U.S. officials. Attorney General Eric Holder earlier this month told ABC News that the ISIS threat is "more frightening than anything I think I've seen as attorney general." (Shit I didn't even know that guy was awake - SL)
McCain told The Republic he doesn't feel personally threatened by either the attention from ISIS or from Putin.
"There's an old saying that you know people by their enemies -- well, I hope that that's true," McCain said. "I hope that the North Korean guy is next."
I think Assad is the lesser of the evils for Syria. Before the uprising, Syria was one of the few countries where Christians, all sects of Islam, and even a few Jews lived in peace. Even at the start of the uprising, I don't think there was ever a clear picture of who was up to what.....most of them were extremist, hiding behind the facade of "rebel" fighters. I really believe that if we interfered in Syria, even from the start, we would have created another Iraq, which is basically what is happening today in Syria. To this day, 98% of Christians and moderate moderate Islam are backing Assad, because they know that the devil you know is bet
Dont know why it posted, but to continue, lol. The devil you now is better than the devil you are introduced to. also, I'm not condoning Saddam, I thought he was crazy in some ways, but Iraq used to be a country where Christians were living in relative peace under his rule..........before we decided to destroy that country. He may have been a lunatic, but at least there was law and order there to a certain extent.
I don't know where you get those figures from. And as far as living in peace well, Assad shattered that. You're right about one thing, there's no clear picture. Bush *thought* the Arab-Muslim world was ready to move forward from brutal dictatorships that enslaved their people and fed them America hate. Well, this (terrorism) is what they've moved on to. Neither is good. But I HAVE TO believe, and hope and pray..... that overall people are good and want to be free. And it would be great if the people would rise up against both dictators and terror groups. For their own benefits. It would be a lot easier if they weren't fed hate and lies by the dictators. I think when seekers of freedom like the people of Iran or the Kurds fighting ISIS start stirring the pot America should do whatever it can to make the spoon accelerate .
The bottom line is, we can't enforce democracy on people who don't want it, nor can live under it. As much as I hate to say, some of these people are scum, and they NEED a dictator to live under............they can not live any other way, because they can't conduct themselves in a matter that a true democracy needs.
CNN just showed video of the people on top of the mountain. There were thousands of them -- farmers, construction workers, university students. Ordinary people who fled their villages when hearing of ISIS approaching now stranded atop a mountain where it's currently 122 degrees. Down below, where ISIS SCUM wait for them to come down so they can saw off their heads it's only 110 degrees. "There is no military solution." BULLSHIT!!! The isolationists who live in a fog worry about a backlash if we act. What about the backlash if we don't??? Build a coalition, go in alone, whatever. Two good reasons 1) Save thousands of lives 2) Destroy the ISIS SCUM
10 Day Forecast for Erbil Iraq
Tonight Aug 9
76[SUP]°F[/SUP]
Clear
Chance of rain:0% Wind: S at 7 mph Details
Sun Aug 10
109[SUP]°[/SUP]
77[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SW at 8 mph Details
Mon Aug 11
109[SUP]°[/SUP]
77[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SW at 8 mph Details
Tue Aug 12
112[SUP]°[/SUP]
78[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: NW at 7 mph Details
Wed Aug 13
113[SUP]°[/SUP]
78[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: WNW at 7 mph Details
Thu Aug 14
113[SUP]°[/SUP]
81[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: NNW at 6 mph Details
Fri Aug 15
111[SUP]°[/SUP]
82[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: NW at 8 mph Details
Sat Aug 16
110[SUP]°[/SUP]
80[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SSW at 9 mph Details
Sun Aug 17
107[SUP]°[/SUP]
81[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SSW at 10 mph Details
Mon Aug 18
108[SUP]°[/SUP]
81[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SW at 8 mph Details
10 Day Forecast for Erbil Iraq
Tonight Aug 9
Clear
Chance of rain:0% Wind: S at 7 mph Details
Sun Aug 10
77[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SW at 8 mph Details
Mon Aug 11
77[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SW at 8 mph Details
Tue Aug 12
78[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: NW at 7 mph Details
Wed Aug 13
78[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: WNW at 7 mph Details
Thu Aug 14
81[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: NNW at 6 mph Details
Fri Aug 15
82[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: NW at 8 mph Details
Sat Aug 16
80[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SSW at 9 mph Details
Sun Aug 17
81[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SSW at 10 mph Details
Mon Aug 18
81[SUP]°[/SUP]
Sunny
Chance of rain:0% Wind: SW at 8 mph Details
Well be glad Israel doesn't feel this way. They're still trying to push democratic institutions on the people that fire on them. But I digress ...... No, we can't. We can only nudge them and hope they continue on the path. But this is a very specific humanitarian situation here. People are under threat of death. Children are dying of dehydration and being buried in shallow graves. We should act to save them. And destroy our common enemy.
This is page one of a ten page article posted on 9/1/01 and unless you Google you will not believe who wrote it! But she is in Obama's ear, right now. So let's see if he will practice what she preaches. The Dick is golfing as I type.
Bystanders to Genocide
The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will—and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
Sep 1 2001, 12:00 PM ET
A few years later, 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.
Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy?
Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?
So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening, that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda.
Thanks to the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.
In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.
This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. 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.
With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts—thousands of Rwandans were dying every day—that were being reported in the morning papers, many did not "fully appreciate" the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential American policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as atrocities or the components and symptoms of genocide but as wartime "casualties"—the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.
Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might reasonably have been expected to "fully appreciate" the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washington that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term "genocide," causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Department to begin debating the word's applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate.
The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices. We also see that with the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Rwanda taken off the table early on—and with crises elsewhere in the world unfolding—the slaughter never received the top-level attention it deserved.
Domestic political forces that might have pressed for action were absent. And most U.S. officials opposed to American involvement in Rwanda were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was "possible" for the United States to do.
One of the most thoughtful analyses of how the American system can remain predicated on the noblest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes was offered in 1971 by a brilliant and earnest young foreign-service officer who had just resigned from the National Security Council to protest the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia. In an article in Foreign Policy, "The Human Reality of Realpolitik," he and a colleague analyzed the process whereby American policymakers with moral sensibilities could have waged a war of such immoral consequence as the one in Vietnam. They wrote,
Bystanders to Genocide
The author's exclusive interviews with scores of the participants in the decision-making, together with her analysis of newly declassified documents, yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will—and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime
Sep 1 2001, 12:00 PM ET
I. People Sitting in Offices
In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.A few years later, 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.
Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy?
Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?
So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening, that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda.
Thanks to the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.
In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.
This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. 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.
With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."
Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts—thousands of Rwandans were dying every day—that were being reported in the morning papers, many did not "fully appreciate" the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential American policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as atrocities or the components and symptoms of genocide but as wartime "casualties"—the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.
Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might reasonably have been expected to "fully appreciate" the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washington that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term "genocide," causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Department to begin debating the word's applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate.
The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices. We also see that with the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Rwanda taken off the table early on—and with crises elsewhere in the world unfolding—the slaughter never received the top-level attention it deserved.
Domestic political forces that might have pressed for action were absent. And most U.S. officials opposed to American involvement in Rwanda were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was "possible" for the United States to do.
One of the most thoughtful analyses of how the American system can remain predicated on the noblest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes was offered in 1971 by a brilliant and earnest young foreign-service officer who had just resigned from the National Security Council to protest the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia. In an article in Foreign Policy, "The Human Reality of Realpolitik," he and a colleague analyzed the process whereby American policymakers with moral sensibilities could have waged a war of such immoral consequence as the one in Vietnam. They wrote,
The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. "Nations," "interests," "influence," "prestige"—all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end.
Policy analysis excluded discussion of human consequences. "It simply is not done," the authors wrote. "Policy—good, steady policy—is made by the 'tough-minded.' To talk of suffering is to lose 'effectiveness,' almost to lose one's grip. It is seen as a sign that one's 'rational' arguments are weak."
