the number 42 said:
1/ For the US, the motivations for going into Rwanda are clearly different from those for going into Iraq i.e. Rwanda hadn't supposedly attacked the US, and had no resources that the US were interested in.
2/ Most people would agree that Rwanda was failed by a lack of intervention, and the opposite is true of Iraq II.
3/ The US government sent in the troops without a clear exit strategy, so after blasting the lid off Pandora's box 'cutting & running', though not at all satisfactory, becomes a real possibility.
4/ The US hasn't lost friends so much for the times it has pulled out, as for the times it has become involved without the support of other nations. Do you really think so many other countries are wrong or cowardly? I would have thought that at least respecting the view of the majority is part of the spirit of democracy.
That was the argument; that, the US had no interests in Rwanda. That, the world had no interests in Rwanda.
Nothing could be selfishly farther from the truth.
What is lost in that shabby calculus is the cost the world pays when there is no credible threat from over the horizon that is going to inhibit the worst examples of megapolitical acts. Rwanda would have been a very accomplishable demonstration of this credibility--the ethnic killings were carried about by teenagers with machetes, easily cowed by unarmed authority, much less, armed authority. The killings were not carried out by the main bodies of rebel and gov't forces.
When the world--not just the US, but the world--repeatedly announced that we live in a world community where rape and murder and genocide is OK, as long as you keep it inside your own home, we threw gasoline on a world smoldering with 2bit thugs hungry for power over the local household.
The UN, in its utopic experiment to unilaterally repeal the Paradox of Violence, is not acting as an instrument of peace, but as an encouragment to endless war and strife.
It is said, "Crime does not pay." That is incomplete; crime pays very well. It is only the balance of civil society, rushing to enforce the laws against crime, that make crime not pay. If society did not effectively make that effort, crime would pay very well.
A corrollary is the use of force/violence; megapolitics as a substitute for politics. Force/violence works very well, unless a price is exacted by the balance of civil society for the use of force/violence. Ultimately, and this much is true, as a last and not first resort, the use of force/violence is sometimes required to exact that price; that's the Paradox of Violence, and it has not been repealed. But, 'last resort' does not mean 'never, under any circumstances' and that is where the UN has been for decades, institutionally. A utopic experiment run off the rails, dangerously so.
Not even Ghandi held the 'never, under any circumstances' belief,' though he is often abused as having believed that.
As it is being managed, the UN today is serving as the official institution of surrender of the civilized world to thugs, encouraging nothing but more of the same, inhibiting violence nowhere.
As the official representive of peacekeeping for the entire world, it is tragically, systematically, and fatally flawed. It is bereft of actually carrying out its stated mission, if that is peace.
Given our limited respurces, the world only gets up to bat in very limited situations, that is exactly right. So, when we finally do get the will to throw resources into a situation, when we finally do get the opportunity to demonstrate a credible deterrent to megapolitical action, what has the world been doing?
Setting up donuts and coffee and bandages, and weekly(and weakly) begging "please, don't, stop."
By Choice.
By Design.
As a plan of inaction.
In other words, demonstrating the impotence of the balance of the world to effectively do anything, even in the limited situations where it has decided to do something.
Because, these 'actions' are being abused as fig leafs, excuses to merely 'contain' the violence, to not actually have to do anything about them, because the holy polls, driven by people sipping our cappuccinos who won't get the full story of what is happening in Rwanda until 10 years after the fact, are saying, "Why go there?"
And, there is the failure of leadership, because there are folks in our leadership, in our government, and in our press who knew exactly and precisley what was going on in Rwanda. The RealPolitick of what they knew also included the poll driven reality that the voting folks did not know.
Maybe it shouldn't be called the Paradox of Violence. Maybe it should be called the Painful Hairshirt Reality of Violence.
I can't blame folks for railing at that reality. I can't blame folks for utopically wishing for a better way.
There is a door that shuts off in the mind, that just says no, I won't accept that reality. Instead, at all costs, the effort is made to deny that the current situation in Iraq has anything to do with the Paradox of Violence, that UN Peacekeeping has nothing to do with the Paradox of Violence, that the Paradox of Violence simply should not be, therefore... it does not exist.
That, paradoxically, what finally actually ended the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans was the violence projected by the Tutsi rebels. Nothing else. If they(or, a world authority)had projected superior violence more vigourously, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. If they by themselves had projected violence less vigorously, hundreds of thousands of lives more would have been lost.
A failure to recognize what Superior Violence is; here is a clear example. A Hutu majority, controlling government in Rwanda, uses the instrument of government to systematically murder and abuse a Tutsi minority. AKA, the unjust first use of violence. In response to that, the Tutsi minority projects Superior Violence; violence exerted in self defense, in response to the unjust first use of violence.
The UN only wanted Peace. The UN could not take 'sides.' THe UN could not recognize right from wrong, only that 'violence is never right, violence is never the answer' and thus placed an official world seal of moral equivalence between acts of murder and genocide and acts of self defense from same. The vast majority of the slaughter occurred by government deployed teams of teenagers with machetes in advance of the Tutsi rebel forces pushing the government troops back. The actual killing was not by either Tutsi or Hutu government forces in the conflict. And, our blind experiment in the unilateral repeal of the Paradox of Violence allowed us to run away from that, even when were there in force, and put the burden on the Tutsi rebel forces to actually end the wholesale slaughter, by force.
And to this, the response is, 'Never mind, old history, nothing to do with Iraq.'
That's it.
The bottom line of our cut and run in SE Asia was millions 'culturally leveled/cleansed,' and/or hurling themselves into the South China Sea to escape the unchecked excesses of the latest 'peoples republic.' None of that was close to a glorious victory for 'Peace.' It was a disgraceful, self-inflicted defeat, catastrophically brought about by our collective confusion and failure to recognize what we were about, or how to be about it, and waged incompetently from afar, target by micromanaged target.
Our cutting and running in SE Asia ended the conflict and killing, but permitted wholesale murder and genocide. Yes, I would say, systematically wiping out the Montagnard counts as a genocide, and it wasn't limited to them. We failed to stop the equphemisically described 'reunification' by force. We also failed to stop the excesses of the 'people' next door, the Khmer Rouge, the Bloods to the Vietnamese Cripps in their local turf war. Yes, we also once were allies with Stalin, too, in another local turf war between Cripps and Bloods, the Stalists and the agrarian Marxists, nor how it was our fault that they filled so many mass graves.
The situations are repetitive. A weak showing against thuggery, then cut and run, and a surrender of the issue at hand to raw brutal force.
Again, and again, and again. Whatever we do, we are going to do imperfectly, including, wage WWII; that is not the issue. The issue is, the most rational long term solution for civilization, in the face of thuggery, is not to face it with nothing stronger than 'expressions of condemnation,' then cut and run, and that has been the institutional bias of the UN on these issues, each and every time, since the end of WWII.
It is an institutional, systematic bias in the UN approach to holding the baton of 'world authority.' That is worse than no world authority at all. No lout in the backseat is worried when the UN threatens "Don't make me come back there!" because time and time and time again, it has proven, even when it does 'come back there' that, it will bend over backwards and turn itself blue in the face huffing and puffing and cajoling and imploring and expressing condemnation before ... cutting and running, fleeing headlong in a graceless panicked retreat, and doing nothing.
As in, umpteen defiant resolutions in Iraq.
As in, Rwanda.
As in, Somalia.
As in, the entire Middle East, in general. World authority? Where is the proof? It is a world committee, an elaborate agreement to do nothing but let the world burn.
As in, the Congo, the latest example of spreading chaos in the world via demonstrated, announced inaction.
),and not because they lost the war,Soon after the war,the US had an interest to rebuild Germany and Japan (economically,from what i know of,they are banned from having nuclear weapons),because they needed to stop the invasion of comunism into Europe and geopolitically,a weak West-Germany would have meant trouble,while in the Atlantic they needed to have some close-range control over the Soviets and later,Chinese.
