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APOLOGIES COME CHEAP
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Peter T. Chattaway
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Apr 01, 2004 22:52 PST
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http://www.steynonline.com/index2.cfm?edit_id=67
How about that Richard Clarke, eh? Apologizing to America for the
government's failure to prevent 9/11: thanks for that, big guy. But, if
you want an example of a President doing nothing to prevent not thousands
but the best part of a million deaths, how about the Rwandan genocide?
Whether or not the Bush Administration could ever have put together a few
random clues -- an uptick in Arab men taking flight-school training, etc
-- in time to prevent what happened on September 11th, it's a proven fact
that Bill Clinton knew about Rwanda and did nothing.
Rich Lowry, the esteemed editor of National Review, now adds a further
wrinkle
[http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_03_28_corner-archive.asp#028454].
Who was at the center of this shameful episode? Why, none other than
Richard Clarke. Elsewhere in National Review, William F Buckley reminds us
that a man cannot apologize for events for which he is not responsible. By
the time of 9/11, Clarke was far removed from the decision-making process.
Thus, he cannot apologize for September 11th. But he might like to
apologize for Rwanda, for which he had far greater responsibility. This
column from exactly six years ago -- The Sunday Telegraph of March 29th
1998 -- discusses the general cheapness of Bill Clinton's apologies (from
which Clarke appears to have learned) and his role in the Rwandan
genocide:
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IN 1960, it was Harold Macmillan with his "wind of change". In 1998, it's
Bill Clinton with a change of wind. "When you look at those children who
greeted us," he told the Rwandans last week, "how could anyone say they
did not want those children to have a chance to have their own children?"
The local dignitaries at Kigali Airport looked bemused: children having
children is not generally a problem in Rwanda, where the fertility rate
per woman is three times that of the United States. But they weren't to
know that, in primitive societies like Washington, every policy position
-- from highway construction to sludge removal and now even to genocide --
has to be introduced with the traditional Clintonian tribal incantation,
"It's about the future of all our children."
The old-school imperialists, we are told, were arrogant and ignorant,
insensitively imposing alien cultural values on Africa. But it's hard to
imagine anything more arrogant, ignorant or alien than the cultural values
the President has been imposing on Africa all week. "Until I was 15,"
bemoans a character in Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, "I was more
familiar with Africa than my own body." Today, cut off by their TV
networks from almost all foreign news, Americans are more familiar with Mr
Clinton's body than with Africa: if you'd wandered into the average high
school last week and invited the pupils to identify the Horn of Africa on
a map, most would have pointed to a picture of the President. But, given
that his entourage is over 700 strong and presumably must include someone
who knows something about the continent, the patronising vapidity of the
Clinton whirlwind Apology Tour is impressive even by his own standards.
He warmed up by apologising for the Cold War. "Very often," he said, in
what was described by aides as "a spur of the moment rumination", "we
dealt with countries in Africa and other parts of the world based more on
how they stood in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet
Union than how they stood in the struggle for their own people's
aspirations to live up to the fullest of their God-given abilities."
In fact, the only thing the West has to apologise for in the Cold War is
that it was too indulgent of Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere and
post-colonial Africa's other founding frauds and simply stood by as they
beggared the continent with their uniquely virulent strain of
Afro-Marxism. The question for Africa is not whether it can recover from
imperialism but from independence.
But by now in his own variation on the American tourist abroad -- "if it's
Tuesday, it must be slavery" -- Mr Clinton had moved on to other
apologies. He apologised for slavery in Uganda, which is a bit like
apologising for the Armenian holocaust in Wales: America's slaves came
from a couple of thousand miles to the west, but hey, all these black guys
look pretty much the same, right? He then glided on to Rwanda to apologise
for the Rwandan genocide, which is a bit like apologising to Germany for
the Nazi holocaust.
"All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices," he
emoted, "who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which
you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." Au contraire, he
appreciated it all too fully: that's why, during the bloodbath, Clinton
Administration officials were specifically instructed not to use the word
"genocide" lest it provoke public pressure to do something.
When General Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the UN
peace-keepers, asked for authorisation to stop the massacres, the
Americans blocked him and had them pulled out. The UN has to learn, said
Mr Clinton, "when to say no". There weren't people like him all over the
world sitting in offices. There was only _him_, sitting in _his_ office,
the Pain-Feeler-In-Chief kissing off half-a-million nobodies: Toot-Toot,
Tutsis, Goo'bye! It's a reasonable position to feel America has no
interest in preventing one bunch of Africans hacking up another bunch of
Africans. But it requires especial reserves of cynicism and contempt to
seek approval for feeling bad about it four years later.
Mr Clinton is in sub-Saharan Africa. But, as at home, he's practising the
politics of the mirage: if what you're saying shimmers brightly enough in
the haze, then arid reality is irrelevant. Perception is all; everything
can be retrospectively fixed, whether it's Gennifer or genocide. On
Rwanda, people will remember not what he did (nothing) but what he feels
(lots). In South Africa, which has not yet advanced to the Clintonian
level of democracy, they were naive enough to express disappointment at
the lack of substance. But, with this President, substance is an oral sex
deposition.
The Rev Jesse Jackson, Mr Clinton's spiritual adviser and special envoy to
Africa, has no time for such jests. "Don't bring that mess over here," he
told one Monica-minded interviewer. "You're in the Mother Country now."
But Africa as a Mother Country is mainly a state of mind. Mr Clinton is
parochial enough to have believed sincerely that his remarks on slavery
would play well with an African audience. In fact, Africans take a relaxed
attitude to the subject, not least because in some parts of the continent
(including the remoter parts of the President's first photo-op, Ghana) it
still goes on. They're also surprised at the way the white man seems so
eager to shoulder all the blame himself: after all, there were Africans
who profited, too; it was a slave _trade_. But, after decades of white
liberal guilt and black activism, African-Americans seem to have a much
shakier grasp of the issue than Africans. "Why did he have to go there to
do that?" said Jawara, a uni-appellated black fruit vendor back in
Brooklyn. "We are still enslaved here." Derrick Z. Jackson, a Boston Globe
columnist, said an apology was meaningless without white America paying
reparations to blacks: the figure he has in mind is $4.7 trillion. Good
luck to him. Life expectancy for American blacks is 69.6 years; for
Ugandans it's 45 years. That may be why, for all the affected solidarity
of their elaborate self-hyphenation, African-Americans generally steer
well clear of the Mother Country. Despite ongoing enslavement, even Jawara
would rather be an African-American than an American-African. There are
some things best left to meaningless Clintonian apologies.
--- Peter T. Chattaway --------------------------- pet-@chattaway.com ---
Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they
claim remembrance, on account of their scars. -- Chris Marker, La Jetee
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