The Burr Under My Saddle

I find myself going back to the Rwanda genocide. The Clinton administration knew all about it and did nothing at all about it. They actively discouraged the UN from even taking up the question. Informed opinion is that they feared another debacle like Somalia. Estimates of the number of people murdered range from 800,000 to 1.2 million. The administration clearly preferred the deaths of vast numbers of strangers to the political risk to themselves of doing anything about it. The Republicans in congress concurred with the inaction. But the chief responsibility was on the chief executive.

Much has been made of Bill Clinton's blow job and of Whitewater and of Hillary lying about sniper fire at Tuzla airport. Her betrayal of her and Bill's mentor and family friend Joe Lieberman has been passed over in silence. But enabling by inaction the deaths of about a million people seems somehow worse. Hillary Clinton may not have been the co-president she once claimed to be, but there can be no doubt that her role in the White House was more than making cookies and tending the children as Laura Bush's is. She was part of the Clinton Administration. No one who participated in a decision that enabled a genocide is fit to be president. No one who participated in a decision that enabled a genocide can be trusted not to do it again.