The Lesson of "Hotel Rwanda"

Brendan Miniter, in his column "The 'Hotel' Lobby" at OpinionJournal.com, gets to the right conclusion, but with the wrong reasoning. Using the movie "Hotel Rwanda" as an example, he discusses how much the average American might like to see our country intervene for more humanitarian purposes around the world:

At one point an enraged group of Hutus drive a pickup truck up to the front gate of Hotel des Mille Collines. The hotel had become a haven for some 1,200 people, mostly Tutsis, and was protected by a small band of United Nation peacekeepers. One of the thugs--a muscular, shirtless man wearing a purple wig--hopped off the back of the truck and tossed a bloodied U.N. helmet at the peacekeepers. He was angry that he couldn't get near the refugees, so he taunted the blue-clad soldiers before jumping back on the truck and taking off down the road.

It was a moment when even doves would wish for a good man with a gun to stand up and do something.

You're damn straight about that. He goes on to say:

What might give policy makers pause is not that the West stood by and did nothing while a brutal genocide was under way in a former Belgian colony--a view of what the world looks like when the U.S. doesn't lead and instead leaves it up to the Europeans and the U.N. to act. But rather that Americans who see this film are likely to walk out and say: We should have done something.

But then he goes off-track:

The primary force moving America away from "realism" is the war on terror, which spurred President Bush's articulated policy of peace through democracy. The president's critics never seem to tire of claiming that the war in Iraq began over weapons of mass destruction and only later morphed into a war of liberation. This criticism isn't entirely right, and in any case it misses the point. The normal pattern for great struggles is for the battle to be joined before the larger, moral reason for fighting takes center stage. So it was for Abraham Lincoln, who waited until two years into the Civil War before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and forever tying the war and its outcome to the abolition of slavery.

By elevating the war on terror to a struggle over human liberty, President Bush has given us a larger moral reason to continue the fight. And he also is ensuring that we'll find natural allies in the people we are fighting to liberate--the very people who we need to stand against the radical Islamists in their midst. It's probably the only way we can win the war on terror. But it is also a policy that will take on its own momentum. If our peace is best secured through other people's democracy, than why not put boots on the ground the next time Haiti or Liberia needs help? Or in Darfur, Sudan, or even North Korea?

I give him credit for going in the right direction. But the civil war was always about slavery. Lincoln may have at first fought for the limited goal of merely saving the Union, but it was was the fight over slavery that caused the war to begin. Iraq doesn't merit the same comparision. The humanitarian reasons for invading Iraq were always given secondary importance by the administration, as they understood that reason alone would not be sufficient to persuade the American people to accept invasion.

I certainly agree with the rhetoric, that the "war on terror" has to be part of a larger effort to promote democracy in the world's troubled regions. I merely have my doubts that a) this is really what the administration is interested in and b) that we have the capability to even carry out such an effort when we shoot ourselves in the foot with human rights violations that turn into PR disasters and a military that's bogged down in Iraq. Miniter admits to problems, but he reamins optimistic:

Presently, this question can be deflected with a simple answer--our military is a little busy right now with Iraq and Afghanistan. But there will come a time when it will not be too busy, when the logic of today's rhetoric will be inescapable. At some point in the near future liberating countries and stopping mass graves from being filled will become an end in itself. There will come a time when we are faced with another Rwanda and policymakers will find out that the American people will not again tolerate doing nothing.

Frankly, nothing would make me happier. Our failure to act in Rwanda was a damn shame because it would have cost us so little, and though the situation in the Sudan is more complicated, there are still concrete steps we could be taking that we have so far failed to take.

I guess in the end I'm just a little less optimistic then Miniter. Our military is more then a little busy in Iraq and Afghanistan; rather, we have no ability to deal with actually issues of our own national security, like nuclear weapons in Iran or North Korea. Secondly, the rhetoric on the "march" of freedom is just that; rhetoric. So far the only countries we've intervened in forcefully are Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which we invaded for reasons of our own security. Third, I hardly trust this administration or Republicans in general as the party that can deal with humanitarian crises; this is the party that sniped at Clinton for daring to rescue the people of Kosovo and Bosnia, who argued that it wasn't worth the life of even one American soldier to save innocent lives elsewhere. And lastly-and I hate to say this-I just don't think the American people have reached the point yet where they will accept intervening in purely humanitarian situations that have no bearing on our national security. The "war on terror", and certainly no courageous politicians, have taught them otherwise, and that's a damn shame.