Twenty years after hundreds of thousands of people were mercilessly slaughtered in the Rwandan genocide, world leaders are still lamenting over the fact that so little was done to intervene and stop the ethnic bloodletting. In just 100 days, over 800,000 people died as Hutu extremists used machetes to murder members of the Tutsi minority; and despite the gravity of this situation, outside intervention was unforgivably non-existent.
The few UN and Belgian forces stationed in Rwanda quickly extricated themselves from the conflict after a few of their own perished. What was the U.S. response? Absolutely nothing. Bill Clinton has even admitted that American inaction during the Rwandan genocide remains as one of the foremost regrets of his presidency.
“We did not act quickly enough after the killing began,” Clinton stated all the way back in 1998 during a speech to genocide survivors in Kigali, Rwanda. “We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become a safe haven for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.”
In the 20 years after the Rwandan genocide, ethnic conflict, and even ethnic slaughter, has by no means been relegated into the annals of history: Although members of Obama’s administration (many of whom are alumni of Clinton’s) have expressed regret for not preventing the genocide then, this regret still hasn’t translated into action in the bloodstained conflicts of the present.
The resemblance between the genocide in Rwanda and the current humanitarian catastrophe in Syria is striking: A president paralyzed by failures in previous U.S. military excursions (in Clinton’s case, Somalia; and in Obama’s case, Iraq and Afghanistan) adopted an overly restrained approach that allowed hundreds of thousands of people to perish in a subsequent conflict.
Although the death toll from the Rwandan genocide was significantly higher than the Syrian crisis at 800,000, Amnesty International reported that at least 190,000 people have been killed since the fighting in Syria began in 2011; furthermore, more than 10 million Syrians, 45 percent of the country’s population, have been displaced.
Obama’s dithering during the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria is in many ways even more egregious than Clinton’s inaction in Rwanda.
For one, Obama had significantly more time to develop and execute a response. While Clinton only had about 100 days to cauterize the bloodletting in Rwanda (a relatively brief window of opportunity), Obama has had about three years to do the same.
Additionally, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime posed a much greater threat to American strategic interests than the Hutu rebel groups. For example, Assad possessed a massive stockpile of chemical weapons, most of which have been destroyed under UN coercion; his regime is Iran’s principal ally in the region, and Assad funded terrorism against Israel — our principal ally in the region.
Under President Obama’s tenure, our miniscule levels of diplomatic and military efforts have done nothing to stop the ethnic powder keg in Syria from erupting into flames with enormous costs in terms of human life. Obama sat there twiddling his thumbs in the White House as Assad continued to murder his own civilians with barrel bombs, chemical weapons, artillery strikes and tanks.
When members of the Obama administration sit down to write their inevitable memoirs and speeches after they leave office, their collective inaction during the Syrian crisis will likely emerge as one their biggest regrets; just as Clinton’s cowardly nonintervention weighed heavily upon his conscience after leaving office, Obama’s indecisiveness on Syria will likely do the same.
However, there’s one major difference between the Rwandan genocide and the Syrian crisis: We still have the opportunity to do something. So, why not do something now to stem the bloodbath in Syria? The administration certainly has the capabilities; what it lacks is the will.
Imposing a no-fly zone would provide relief to thousands of Syrian civilians who suffer daily from relentless barrel bomb attacks. According to Human Rights Watch, Assad’s forces use attack helicopters to drop an average of five barrel bombs per day, which are unguided bombs constructed from oil drums and filled with high explosive and scrap metal to increase fragmentation.
Although Syrian air defense systems at the start of the war were “ranked among the most capable and dense in the world, perhaps second only to North Korea’s and Russia’s,” according to a 2013 assessment by the U.S. Air Force, their defenses have since been decimated after years of fighting.
According to an anonymous Pentagon official speaking to Bloomberg View, the assessment now of Syrian capabilities is dramatically different: “The regime’s integrated air defense system is hollowed out and does not represent a threat to U.S. assets,” the Pentagon official said.
Thus, Obama should immediately impose a no-fly zone to prevent Assad from butchering more civilians; by learning from Clinton’s indecisiveness and subsequent regrets, Obama can ensure that the blood from his inaction doesn’t stain his legacy any more than it already has.