Yoshie: No position we (US leftists) could have taken in 1994 would have made any difference in Rwanda. If we had acted earlier, say in 1990, vigorously opposing US support for Paul Kagame and the Rwanda Patriotic Army (see below), or better yet, if we had built our strength enough to effectively counter the Washington consensus on economy (see below), we might have been able to make a difference. (Likewise, we [US leftists] couldn't have done anything to prevent the 9.11 attacks in 2001, but we could have acted earlier, when the USSR still existed, to vigorously oppose US support of mujahideen in Afghanistan, which might have made a difference.) ----- These are tendentious arguments. The US could have allowed more UN peacekeepers or at least equipment to go to Rwanda which would have prevented the genocide. Instead they actively blocked efforts to do either. (But at least they didn't intervene in order to allow the genocidaires back home as the French did!)
>From Philip Gourevitch's _We wish to inform you that tomorrow
we will be killed with our families_:
"In mid-Decemeber of 1997, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delievered a speech to the Orgazination of African Unity in Addis Ababa in which she said, "We, the international community, should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, and called them what they were - genocide."
A rare mea culpa from the Empire.
Peter