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In my previous post I mentioned the need for a "grassroots media offensive" to counter the negative misinformation and media manipulation employed by Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama. As much as Obama or any of us might prefer to take the high road and stay positive, the failure to push back against a negative campaign like Clinton's can produce the kind of dismal results we saw earlier this week in Ohio and Texas. If Clinton wants to "throw the kitchen sink" at Obama, in other words, then the Obama campaign and its supporters across the United States need to throw the refrigerator, the dishwasher, and the microwave right back at her. Through blogs, op-eds, letters to the editor, and other means of media activism, Obama's netroots can play an important role in fighting the Clinton misinformation machine and keeping the story straight. A case in point is the claim of vastly superior readiness to serve as commander-in-chief and world leader she makes in her recent "three a.m. phone call" ad, and the truth of her role as a member of her husband's administration in its disgraceful failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Since Hillary insists on taking credit for the supposed accomplishments of her husband's administration, she should also take responsibility for its failures. High on the list of these is the Clintons' failure to respond to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. While 800,000 people were slaughtered in 100 days of killing in Rwanda, neither the most powerful man on earth nor his wife lifted so much as a finger to stop it. The Clintons have claimed that they were unaware of the scope of the killing at the time, but investigations including research of classified documents released since show that the administration was fully aware of what was happening on a daily basis and chose inaction, as detailed by Samantha Power in the Atlantic Monthly, by David Corn in The Nation, and by William Ferroggiaro at George Washington University's National Security Archive, among many others. As Samantha Power writes, these investigations "yield a chilling narrative of self-serving caution and flaccid will - and countless missed opportunities to mitigate a colossal crime." Citing Bill Clinton's 1998 "apology" for his failure to act, in which he stated simply that "we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred," Power charges that in fact the Clinton administration
"...did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term 'genocide,' for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing 'to try to limit what occurred.' Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective."
Hillary Clinton's shared responsibility for the refusal of her husband's administration to respond to the genocide in Rwanda is examined by the Sacramento Bee and by Visible Vote '08. As Pauline Park observes in Visible Vote '08, Bill Clinton has claimed that, had Hillary been president, she would have acted more aggressively than he to stop the killing in Rwanda. Woulda, shoulda, coulda: As a First Lady with unprecended influence in her husband's administration, she certainly could have acted, but like her husband chose on the basis of political convenience not to act. Citing a related article by Patrick Healy from the New York Times, and comparing the Rwanda failure with that of the first Clinton health care plan, Park continues:
"Clinton is now running as the candidate with the experience to be president 'on day one.' As Patrick Healy wrote recently in the New York Times, Hillary is attempting to portray herself as 'a full partner to her husband in his administration,' and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her 'eight years with a front-row seat on history.' And it is certainly true that Hillary was the first First Lady to get an office in the policy-making West Wing rather than in the ceremonial East Wing, where First Ladies traditionally had their offices. But the First Lady 'did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda,' Healy concludes. And the one initiative in which Hillary was given a leading role - health care reform - was a complete and utter failure, so much so that it ushered in 12 years of Republican control of Congress."
Since that time, as we know, Senator Hillary Clinton's own "3 a.m. phone call" came in the form of an up or down vote on the 2002 Iraq war resolution; and as we also know, the senator dropped the ball and voted for war in Iraq, even as 147 of her Democratic colleagues in Congress voted against it. Furthermore, Clinton has admitted that she cast this vote without even bothering to read the 90-page National Security Estimate on Iraq that she and her colleagues were all urged to read before voting. As in the case of Rwanda, Clinton chose political convenience over principle, and simply followed the prevailing political wind in the country at the time. As in the case of Rwanda also, many thousands of lives have been lost as the result of a decision for which Hillary Clinton shares responsibility.
This is not who I want answering the phone at 3 a.m.
Mark C. Eades
http://www.mceades.com
