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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2005-01-08

Lucid Commentary From . . . Hollywood?

It will be almost never that the pages of this blog are used to point out a Hollywood celeb's opinion. But, I suppose, there must be exceptions that can prove the rule. Today is one such occassion.

Don Cheadle, the actor (Ocean's Eleven and Twelve), has co-written a piece with John Prendergrast (formerly of the Clinton NSC) in today's Boston Globe called Rwanda's Lessons Yet To Be Learned. Using the expertise he gained on the set of "Hotel Rwanda", I suppose, Cheadle makes a surprisingly honest and obvious argument for more, and more effective, intervention in the Congo and Sudan.

The point of such a scene and such a film is not just to document the story of what happened so that we can understand it better. It is much more about the future, so that the overused phrase "Never Again" might one day have some shred of meaning, some shred of truth.

The future is now. In Congo and Sudan, unspeakable atrocities are being committed in the context of civil wars which have taken the lives of approximately six million people. The parallels of this modern-day holocaust to 1994's genocide in Rwanda are stark.

I have wondered what role the U.S. could be playing in Africa right now if our troops weren't engaged in Iraq? I know that Iraq is central to the war on terror, and I know that, in the long run, promoting democracy and liberty around the world is the best way to prevent genocides like Rwanda, Congo and Sudan. But, just supposing our troops weren't engaged, would we have the will to look at the atrocities in sub-Saharan Afraic and take a leading role to end them? I don't know. I hope so.

It would seem that there should be an ability and a willingness to protect all of humanity, if from nobody else than from itself. That the Clinton administration failed to intervene in Rwanda, and only slowly intervened in the Baltics seemed to me to belie their "global responsibility" talk, to the U.S.'s ultimate shame. Like it or not, we are the world's only effective police force right now. The U.N., even when it's not too busy molesting the very people it's supposed to be protecting, is remarkably useless at doing this type of work around the world. And, oddly enough, Cheadle and Prendergrast make that very point:

The failure to act forcefully in Sudan and Congo highlights how little progress the world has made since the events of 1994. These debacles also remind us that the world body charged with leading the response to crises of this kind -- the United Nations Security Council -- remains unwilling or unable to confront the perpetrators of mass atrocities in the world's peripheral zones. Divisions within the Security Council over whether to act remain huge, and the divisions themselves become an excuse for inaction.

I don't want to go too far with this--I'm not sure it is the right and proper role of the U.S. to be shipping off to every backwater that's suffering civil unrest. But it does seem as if, in cases where there are clear divisions of perpetrators and victims, that we ought to have the will to be a forceful proponent of good. And not just as body shields--"Peacekeepers" whose mandate is to stand in the way of bullets without responding; we should have real ability to end the lives and regimes of the people perpetrating genocide.

The United States has proven over the last two weeks that its ability to respond to crisis anywhere in the world is unmatched in the world or in history. Just this morning the World Health Organization has stated that there have been no outbreaks of disease among the survivors of the tsunami. This is remarkable, and, no doubt, largely due to the remarkable efforts of the U.S. military and NGO's to get immediate assistance into the area without waiting for the U.N. bloviocrats to hold a meeting. But, perhaps, we ought to consider being that responsive to man-made disasters.

In the long run, what really worries me is that all of the lessons of history--from Rwanda to the Killing Fields to Nazi Germany--are still subject to "interpretation" by bureaucrats who, above all else, value stability, even when stability is accompanied by atrocity.

What good is it to be pre-eminent in the world, when such pre-eminence buys us only hatred, and only improves the world over the resistance of everybody else?
Posted by: Michael / 1/08/2005 11:02:00 AM

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