APOLOGIES COME CHEAP

How about that Richard Clarke, eh? Apologizing to America for the government’s failure to prevent 9/11: 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? 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 September 11th, it’s a proven fact that Bill Clinton knew about Rwanda and did nothing.

Rich Lowry, the esteemed editor of National Review, now adds a further wrinkle. Who was at the center of this shameful episode? Why, none other than Richard Clarke. Elsewhere in National Review, William F Buckley reminds us that a man cannot apologize for events for which he is not responsible. By the time of 9/11, Clarke was far removed from the decision-making process. Thus, he cannot apologize for September 11th. But he might like to apologize for Rwanda, for which he had far greater responsibility. This column from exactly six years ago – The Sunday Telegraph of March 29th 1998 – discusses the general cheapness of Bill Clinton’s apologies (from which Clarke appears to have learned) and his role in the Rwandan genocide:

IN 1960, it was Harold Macmillan with his "wind of change". In 1998, it's Bill Clinton with a change of wind. "When you look at those children who greeted us," he told the Rwandans last week, "how could anyone say they did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children?"

The local dignitaries at Kigali Airport looked bemused: children having children is not generally a problem in Rwanda, where the fertility rate per woman is three times that of the United States. But they weren't to know that, in primitive societies like Washington, every policy position - from highway construction to sludge removal and now even to genocide - has to be introduced with the traditional Clintonian tribal incantation, "It's about the future of all our children."

The old-school imperialists, we are told, were arrogant and ignorant, insensitively imposing alien cultural values on Africa. But it's hard to imagine anything more arrogant, ignorant or alien than the cultural values the President has been imposing on Africa all week. "Until I was 15," bemoans a character in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, "I was more familiar with Africa than my own body." Today, cut off by their TV networks from almost all foreign news, Americans are more familiar with Mr Clinton's body than with Africa: if you'd wandered into the average high school last week and invited the pupils to identify the Horn of Africa on a map, most would have pointed to a picture of the President. But, given that his entourage is over 700 strong and presumably must include someone who knows something about the continent, the patronising vapidity of the Clinton whirlwind Apology Tour is impressive even by his own standards.

He warmed up by apologising for the Cold War. "Very often," he said, in what was described by aides as "a spur of the moment rumination", "we dealt with countries in Africa and other parts of the world based more on how they stood in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union than how they stood in the struggle for their own people's aspirations to live up to the fullest of their God-given abilities."

In fact, the only thing the West has to apologise for in the Cold War is that it was too indulgent of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and post-colonial Africa's other founding frauds and simply stood by as they beggared the continent with their uniquely virulent strain of Afro-Marxism. The question for Africa is not whether it can recover from imperialism but from independence.

But by now in his own variation on the American tourist abroad - "if it's Tuesday, it must be slavery" - Mr Clinton had moved on to other apologies. He apologised for slavery in Uganda, which is a bit like apologising for the Armenian holocaust in Wales: America's slaves came from a couple of thousand miles to the west, but hey, all these black guys look pretty much the same, right? He then glided on to Rwanda to apologise for the Rwandan genocide, which is a bit like apologising to Germany for the Nazi holocaust.

"All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices," he emoted, "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.

When General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN peace-keepers, asked for authorisation to stop the massacres, the Americans blocked him and had them pulled out. The UN has to learn, said Mr Clinton, "when to say no". There weren't people like him all over the world sitting in offices. There was only him, sitting in his office, the Pain-Feeler-In-Chief kissing off half-a-million nobodies: Toot-Toot, Tutsis, Goo'bye! It's a reasonable position to feel America has no interest in preventing one bunch of Africans hacking up another bunch of Africans. But it requires especial reserves of cynicism and contempt to seek approval for feeling bad about it four years later.

Mr Clinton is in sub-Saharan Africa. But, as at home, he's practising the politics of the mirage: if what you're saying shimmers brightly enough in the haze, then arid reality is irrelevant. Perception is all; everything can be retrospectively fixed, whether it's Gennifer or genocide. On Rwanda, people will remember not what he did (nothing) but what he feels (lots). In South Africa, which has not yet advanced to the Clintonian level of democracy, they were naive enough to express disappointment at the lack of substance. But, with this President, substance is an oral sex deposition.

The Rev Jesse Jackson, Mr Clinton's spiritual adviser and special envoy to Africa, has no time for such jests. "Don't bring that mess over here," he told one Monica-minded interviewer. "You're in the Mother Country now." But Africa as a Mother Country is mainly a state of mind. Mr Clinton is parochial enough to have believed sincerely that his remarks on slavery would play well with an African audience. In fact, Africans take a relaxed attitude to the subject, not least because in some parts of the continent (including the remoter parts of the President's first photo-op, Ghana) it still goes on. They're also surprised at the way the white man seems so eager to shoulder all the blame himself: after all, there were Africans who profited, too; it was a slave trade. But, after decades of white liberal guilt and black activism, African-Americans seem to have a much shakier grasp of the issue than Africans. "Why did he have to go there to do that?" said Jawara, a uni-appellated black fruit vendor back in Brooklyn. "We are still enslaved here." Derrick Z. Jackson, a Boston Globe columnist, said an apology was meaningless without white America paying reparations to blacks: the figure he has in mind is $4.7 trillion. Good luck to him. Life expectancy for American blacks is 69.6 years; for Ugandans it's 45 years. That may be why, for all the affected solidarity of their elaborate self-hyphenation, African-Americans generally steer well clear of the Mother Country. Despite ongoing enslavement, even Jawara would rather be an African-American than an American-African. There are some things best left to meaningless Clintonian apologies.

Although I am somewhat used to Stein's ability with words, I have never read an article of his more dripping in scorn and contempt for Clinton and Clarke than this one. He was truly enraged by the situation - and you will be too!

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Last night, there was a two hour program on PBS (yes, PBS!) on Clinton's Rwanda Genocide. It was interesting and very grim. While Willie was burchering Christian children at Waco, blacks were butchering about a million other blacks in East Africa. Willie did nothing to stop either tragedy.

I couldn't belief that PBS carried a program that showed such a stark difference between the sleazy dems and what everyone knows W would have done. Of course, blacks in America would have prompted W. With dems, US blacks say/do nothing because they don't want to risk upsetting them no matter how many African blacks are murdered.

It was a very strange placement for PBS and made Willie and the dems look REALLY bad, something PBS NEVER does!

He was truly enraged by the situation - and you will be too!

Yep. Watching the Clintonistas, pointing their pizza stained fingers forward, backward and anywhere but to themselves, just about blew my lid off. Those long night BS sessions sure solved a lot of problems. For which they are now apologising, as in "I'm sorry Bush failed the country." Phauggghhh. Spit.

You have to understand that some ethnographers list the Tutsi as "Caucasian" and the Hutu as 'Negroid".
Add the fact that the minority Tutsi ruled the majority Hutu for centuries and it obviously would be hideously politically incorrect not to allow the downtrodden Hutu to commit Genocide.

Besides, there were no votes to be gained by intervening.

So9

The FRONTLINE documentary on the Tutsi genocide was superb, some of the finest journalism I've ever seen.

Its protrayal of this horrific human tragedy also encapsulated to sorry presidency of Bill Clinton and the pathetic performance of the Clinton Administration.

Particularly significant to today's news was the identity of the White House figure who adamently demanded the withdrawal of UN troops from Rwanda.

It was none other than RICHARD CLARKE who demanded that the UN withdraw and leave the Tutsis to their fate, a genocide of 800,000 souls.

Personally, I think there is a reasonable debate over whether the US should get involved in foreign conflicts. However, Clinton had a position; he was an internationalist. With that position on the issue, he and his administration have blood on their hands.

The FRONTLINE documentary was scathing in its criticism of Clinton's subsequent visit; in its own way, as scathing as Steyn.

It's not enough to get me to voluntarily contribute to PBS, but FRONTLINE does a great job even if it usually has liberal tilt. The tilt is entirely absent in the Rwanda episode.

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