It is indeed disturbing that an observation like "the US always does the wrong thing" can be transformed into an abstract causal force, like some physical law of nature, and then used to argue against ever pressuring for US participation in a multilateral action. While this list will always have its predictable voices to make such a case, it's been discomfiting lately to see those of less doctrinaire temperment venture down that path as well.
I share Doug's revulsion for "the Blair-like need to be the humanitarian rescue team to save the rest of the world from themselves, conveniently forgetting how much damage they have inflicted on the suffering masses."
But what I can't get my head around is how these words were written re a case where the "Blair-like rescue team" (would have been played by US, France) did all possible to weasel _out_ of action, and where those more on the side of "suffering masses" (e.g., the nonpermanent members of the security council) tried in vain to keep UN forces in place to halt that unambiguous, methodical, and stunningly public slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands.
Presumably Doug's reasoning would be something like: so long as the US/bourgeois west holds such hegemonic power, it's counter-productive to pressure it to act as a moral agent because such actions will only consolidate Western hegemony.
If that's your argument, Doug, then I hope you continue to ask Driscollean (mmm, nice word) questions to your answers. Can circumstances _ever_ override this principle? no matter how unambiguously horrific the immediate situation? no matter what the particular local/global context might be? no matter how pressurable the US gov't might be in a particular context? no matter what, in a given situation, your stance might sacrifice on some other register (discursively, politically, morally, strategically) by holding to this principle?
Nobody's doubting, at least I'm not for a second doubting, that the insidious dangers of humanitarian hegemony should always be a vital consideration. Alertness to its perils is probably the best place to start from when evaluating how our energies should be channeled in a given situation. But does this hegemony-aspect always, up until the revolution, have to trump all other concerns?
Obviously, I think Rwanda exemplifies the horrific dangers of holding to that anti-rescue-team principle above all else. And precisely because the hegemony-concern is a vital one, I of course also think it's important (and always try, and hope others do too) when discussing Rwanda to squarely addresse the hegemony factor. Which means discussing the situation's particular circumstances in some detail (e.g. detailing why, as I've used lots of bandwidth arguing before, in _this_ case minimal UN forces would have easily halted the slaughter; in _this_ case the Clinton administration was pressurable; in _this_ case, discursive plunder lay less in Clinton-Blair Humanitarian Heroism but in the stomach-turning primitivist tropes justify inaction, etc.).
Of course, people can disagree on the specifics of a given case, and those differences should be discussed. But it's striking how specific discussion around Rwanda's genocide seems so quickly to derail: either by focusing instead on what's happened since the genocide (a worthy topic, but in itself of limited value for understanding where things stood in '94), or by conjuring contexts that differed vastly from this one ("look what the US did in Iraq, El Salvador..."), or by tautologous reification ("any involvement would have been worse, because it is the Nature of US Involvment to always be worse").
If no details about these circumstances are needed, because a priori they cannot override the broader hegemony-concern and its accompanying hands-off politics, then a further unpacking of this reasoning would probably be helpful for the list. In fact, while unpacking it, it might be edifying to bring in issues percolating elsewhere on lbo. For instance, recently:
-- Carrol recounted how the Civil Rights Act and ERA's passage through Congress were won not because of who was in office, but because office-holders were pressured to act, as a result of mass action and opinion;
-- Doug posted (approvingly I assume) on the WB's retreat from its draconian policy of requiring third-world governments to charge the poor for access to healthcare, a retreat not issuing from newfound WB compassion, but as response to mounting pressure against their hideous policy;
-- Edward Said, in a cross-posting, argued for a mobilized mass campaign directed at the American population on behalf of Palestinian rights, because only through such mobilized pressure was there any chance of checking the US's pro-Israel brokering.
Big differences, of course, in all these cases. But if there's an encompassing logic out there that would simultaneously (a) support, in cases like the above, mass action forcing hegemonic institutions to respond to popular demands, but (b) disapprove of the mobilizing efforts that tried to pressure the US to fund UN peacekeeping during this horrific genocide, then I'd welcome a clearer exposition of that logic.
Maureen