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A team of genocide fighters

    by Will Bunch | Columnist
    Published 

I don't know about you, but I'm kind of bored already with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton -- and she hasn't even been appointed yet! (The journalist in me is looking forward, however, for the long-awaited disclosure of the big-bucks backers for Bill Clinton's pet projects -- I'm kind of surprised that it wasn't dumped at 4:55 p.m. on Thanksgiving Eve.) As noted earlier, I'm more eager to learn the "what" of Barack Obama's foreign policy than the "who":

Today's New York Times had a fascinating glimpse at one issue. Mass killing? He's against it.:

The choice of [Susan] Rice to represent the United States before the United Nations will make her one of the most visible faces of the Obama administration to the outside world aside from Mrs. Clinton. It will also send to the world organization a prominent and forceful advocate of stronger action, including military force if necessary, to stop mass killings like those in the Darfur region of Sudan in recent years.

Here's more:

During her first run at the State Department, Ms. Rice was a point person in responding to Al Qaeda's 1998 bombing of United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. But her most searing experience was visiting Rwanda after the 1994 genocide when she was still on the N.S.C. staff.
As she later described the scene, the hundreds, if not thousands, of decomposing, hacked up bodies that she saw haunted her and fueled a desire to never let it happen again.
"I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required," she told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001. She eventually became a sharp critic of the Bush administration's handling of the Darfur killings and last year testified before Congress on behalf of an American-led bombing campaign or naval blockade to force a recalcitrant Sudanese government to stop the slaughter.

There's no bigger foreign policy facing America than when and if to use military force. The only instance that the overwhelming majority of the nation will support are clear cases of self-defense; the reason people rallied because the 2001 use of force in Afghanistan was because this was a government that had harbored and trained terrorists who mounted a direct attack on the United States. Conversely, Iraq should have been a non-starter -- ultimately tied to American geopolitical dominance and other factors that should not be a legitimate causus belli.

Genocide is a tipping point. I believe that the United States has an obligation to rally world military support and play an active role when there's an opportunity to stop a program of genocide while it's in progress. For the most part, we've regretted the times we didn't get involved -- most notably Rwanda -- and seen mostly positive results when we have taken action, as in took place in Bosnia a few years later. It's true, however, that a humanitarian mission that started with noble intentions -- in Somalia in 1992-93 -- went horribly awry.

The obvious lesson is that military missions with a humanitarian bent shouldn't be launched willy-nilly -- and we all hope for a world in which American troops would never need to fight abroad. But if they must, I'm much rather seen our powerful (bloatedly so) military machine used to stop mass killings rather than establishing hegemony in oil-exporting regions. I'm glad to see that President-elect Obama assembling a team that views the world this way as well.

    WB
    Will Bunch