That Hillary actively tried to get Bill to intervene in the Rwandan Genocide.
The Quote: (from ABC News):
STEPHANOPOULOS: President Clinton has said, has suggested that you urged him to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Is that true? CLINTON: It is. It is true. And, you know, I believe that our government failed. We obviously didn't have a lot of good options. It moved very quickly. It was a difficult, terrible genocide to try to get our arms around and to do something to try to stem or prevent.
The Vetting:
First - No one in the Clinton administration, no public records (including speeches, quotes, minutes from official meetings, Bill and Hillary's memoirs), nothing in any comprehensive analysis of the tragedy, no American historian or scholar, nor any Rwandan historian or scholar attributes anything, not even an effort, to Hillary Clinton. In reality, pretty much every document on the genocide describes the very active and staunch policy of removing all of, not only our troops, but the entirety of the UN deployment.
Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, after "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," as well as "dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda," in an Atlantic Monthly article from 2001 (well before she knew who Obama was) described the specifics:
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.
For more, see the Additional Notes on the bottom.
Second - As noted above, the troops the Clinton administration successfully fought to pull out of Rwanda were United Nations troops. Intervening, as the question was presented to Hillary, would have been drastically different than pulling out, given that we would have acted unilaterally, and had to have the option of suppression (which is, basically, an invasion). So either Hillary didn't have the information (and thus, no relevant experience) or she didn't have the judgment to know not to let the UN troops get pulled out. But, then, when she did have sufficient information, her judgment was to silently advocate a US invasion of the country? And she felt so passionately about it, she never mentioned it to another person? Either way you slice it, it doesn't look like this is a positive for her.
Third - If it were that easy to stem a government inflicted genocide, against the will of the government, unilaterally, we would have been in Darfur last year. Additionally, Bill's failure in Somalia wouldn't have made him all too welcome in Rwanda, had the US tried to go in unilaterally. This failure in Somalia, by the way, is the reason Bill wanted to get out of Rwanda in the first place (see Additional Notes on the bottom for information).
Fourth - Power cites an example that directly contradicts Bill and Hillary's claims:
A few years [after the 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."
Now, if Hillary was discussing the severity of this crisis with Bill as it was happening, how could he have been ignorant of the magnitude of the genocide (or even how it happened)? Either way, they are both lying at least one of these times (most definitely both of them).
Fifth - SHE IS PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE GENOCIDE OF ALMOST ONE MILLION PEOPLE.
Additional Notes:
From a piece on Hillary's "Experience" in the Chicago Tribune:
Key foreign policy officials say that a U.S. military intervention in Rwanda was never considered in the Clinton administration's policy deliberations. Despite lengthy memoirs by both Clintons and former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador Madeline Albright, any advice she gave on Rwanda had not been mentioned until her presidential campaign. "In my review of the records, I didn't find anything to suggest that military intervention was put on the table in NSC [National Security Council] deliberations," said Gail Smith, a Clinton NSC official (and Obama supporter) who did a review for the White House of the administration's handling of the Rwandan genocide. Prudence Bushnell, a retired State Department official who handled the Rwanda portfolio at the time and has not allied with a presidential candidate, confirmed that a U.S. military intervention was not considered in policy deliberations, as did several senior Clinton administration officials with first-hand knowledge who declined to be identified.
From an absolutely fantastic piece from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings specifically about Hillary Clinton and Rwanda:
So, to sum up: the US didn't just fail to intervene in Rwanda. Our government urged the withdrawal of the UN peacekeeping forces that were on the ground protecting Rwandans, for no better reason than to keep the Belgians from looking like cowards. It refused to jam the radio station that was passing on instructions for genocide. It blocked further efforts to reinforce the peacekeeping forces there. It also failed to do any of the much smaller things that might have shown that our government was not wholly indifferent to the people of Rwanda who were, at that time, being hacked to death with machetes.
It's worth bearing this background in mind when you hear Hillary Clinton claim that she advocated military intervention in Rwanda. . . It's a lot harder to imagine that while Hillary Clinton was advocating military intervention, she not only failed to convince her husband to send troops, but also failed to convince him, for instance, not to advocate the withdrawal of most of the UN peacekeepers, or that he really ought to order the Pentagon to jam Radio Milles Collines. If she was doing her best behind the scenes, and failed to accomplish even this -- if, despite her best efforts, she couldn't persuade her husband not to advocate withdrawing UN peacekeepers just to provide cover for the Belgians -- then we really need to ask how effective an advocate she really is, especially since no one except her husband, in full campaign mode, seems to remember her efforts at all.
Of course, I think it's a lot more likely that she either didn't advocate action on Rwanda at all, or did so only in passing. If so, this would have to be the definitive example of her attempt to claim responsibility for everything good that happened during her husband's presidency, while disavowing all responsibility for his mistakes. This was, in my opinion, the most shameful moment of the Clinton administration.
The Somalia Connection:
After the failure of the Somalian mission, as a military intervention for humanitarian purposes, the Clinton administration completely revamped their outlook on humanitarian intervention. Our pulling out of Rwanda and letting the genocide occur was much more in line with that new outlook. In essence, our intervention in Somalia made any "intervention" in Rwanda not even up for discussion.
(from the book A People Betrayed by LR Melvern, p 190-191):
[T]he position of the Clinton administration became clear at a press conference given by national security adviser, Anthony Lake. Lake explained that America could not solve other people's problems. Nor could America build their states for them.
"When I wake up every morning and look at the headlines and the stories and the images on television of these conflicts, I want to work to end every conflict. I want to work to save every child out there. And I know the president does, and I know the American people do. But neither we nor the international community have the resources nor the mandate to do so. So we have to make distinctions. We have to ask the hard questions about where and when we can intervene. . . these kinds of conflicts are particularly hard to come to grips with and to have an effect on from outside, because basically, of course, their origins are in political turmoil within these nations. And that political turmoil may not be susceptible to the efforts of the international community. So, neither we nor the international community have either the mandate nor the resources nor the possibility of resolving every conflict of this kind."
This press conference marked the publication of the first ever comprehensive review on US policy towards multilateral peace operations. The review, months in preparation, and post-Somalia, was known as presidential decision directive no. 25 (PDD-25) and it set strict limits on future US involvement with the UN, which from now on was going to depend on certain criteria: whether or not US interests were at stake, whether or not there was a threat to world peace, a clear mission goal, acceptable costs, congressional, public, and allied support, a working ceasefire, a clean command and control and a clear exit point.
Rwanda failed every criterion bar one.
Lastly, for anyone with a vested interest in the subject, I would very strongly recommend A People Betrayed by LR Melvern. An absolutely fantastic and informative read.
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