This kinda got lost in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, but it’s some prime doublespeak.
But there are depths even Mr. Bush shouldn’t be allowed to plumb without rebuttal. This week, his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reached these limits. Pouring contempt on the UN’s record of inaction, Mr. Fleischer said on Monday that, “from the moral point of view, as the world witnessed in Rwanda . . . the UN Security Council will have failed to act once again.” In a literal sense, he is dead right; the Security Council did fail miserably in 1994. But his insinuation distorts what happened. With the ninth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide only weeks away, certain truths mustn’t become casualties of U.S. spin doctors.
To begin, Mr. Fleischer should review an interview between ABC’s Sam Donaldson and Mr. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign. When Mr. Donaldson asked him what he would do if “God forbid, another Rwanda should take place,” Mr. Bush replied: “We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide outside our strategic interests. . . . I would not send the United States troops into Rwanda.”
Second, as Mr. Fleischer must surely know, the Security Council failed to intervene in Rwanda because Washington opposed any such intervention. This was the stance pushed by UN ambassador Madeleine Albright on behalf of the Clinton administration, and the position of Republicans in Congress. A rare moment of U.S. political consensus allowed a clique of Rwandan extremists to orchestrate one of the classical cases of genocide in the 20th century, annihilating some 800,000 Tutsis and thousands of moderate Hutus.
To highlight today’s moral irony, America’s efforts to prevent the Security Council from intervening in Rwanda was fervently seconded by none other than Britain, then led by John Major.”