A Line In The Shifting Sands

Newsday’s Matthew McAllester, March 12, 2006:

…The massacre of the Srebrenica Muslims represented a failure by the international community as countries including the United States failed to endorse the use of significant NATO air strikes, now almost universally seen by historians as the only way the killings could have been prevented.

Last year, on the 10th anniversary of the massacre, British foreign secretary Jack Straw acknowledged the failure and apologized. “For it is to the shame of the international community that this evil took place under our noses and we did nothing like enough,” he said. “I bitterly regret this and I am deeply sorry for it.”…

Newsday’s Tina Susman, May 7, 2006:

…Had the United States acted more decisively back then, foreign policy experts say, things might be far different today in the arid, remote [Darfur] region, where international aid groups estimated that anywhere from 180,000 to 400,000 civilians have died, and where 2 million people have been forced from their homes.

“The fact that there was no [U.S.] interest in acting beyond making the declaration of genocide really took the wind out of the sails” of the accusation, said Juan Mendez, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special adviser on the prevention of genocide…

Also worth noting, in the same piece:

…Susan Rice, who was Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said the Bush administration’s approach to Darfur showed that it had not learned from Rwanda. “They have repeated that error, with the added moral burden of instead of failing to act in a three-month period to halt a lightning-fast genocide, they failed to act effectively in a three-year period,” said Rice, who is now at the Brookings Institution think tank…

We had all thought that Bill Clinton had formulated Rwandan U.S. policy, and not George W. Bush . . . considering Mr Clinton had been President of the United States in 1994. Yes, yes, of course, Ms Rice was referring to the Bush administration’s supposedly not learning from “that error” made by the Clinton administration.  Still, that characterization seems odd . . . given that we were sure it was only the Bush administration which made foreign policy errors?

Newsday’s Letta Taylor, February 21, 2006:

…United Nations officials and diplomats from countries that poured millions of dollars into the election say Préval’s actions since the vote suggest he is not a pawn of the divisive Aristide…

…Another welcome sign, diplomats said, was Préval’s ability to keep protests calm in a country notorious for political violence. A 9,300-member UN peacekeeping force [which includes U.S. troops] has struggled to keep order in this nation of 8.3 million since Aristide’s ouster…

…”We want this government to succeed,” said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

But political analysts wonder whether the world’s traditionally fickle interest in Haiti will last.

“The international community knows how to organize elections,” said Dan Erikson, a Caribbean expert with the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank. “But it’s not good at sticking around to build functioning democratic institutions.”…

Newsday editorial, April 10, 2007:

…After four years and more than 60,000 Iraqi deaths by the most conservative estimates, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see the United States as anything else but an ineffectual military mediator in a sectarian civil war. Staying the course is now absurd. The United States must find ways to extricate itself from this war without doing itself and the region even greater harm…

…there are serious doubts that the continued presence of U.S. troops will make much difference in the end if this war has taken on the attributes of a classic civil war. As James D. Fearon, a professor of political science at Stamford University, writes in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, cases of modern civil wars “suggest that the Bush administration’s political objective in Iraq – creating a stable, peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops – is unrealistic.”…

Good.  Now we are clear on matters.  According to Newsday, Iraq is pretty much the only place that the U.S. should not endeavor to assist in the struggle for democracy and/or be a military mediator in a civil war.