Crossing the line

When should the U.S. intervene in conflicts around the world?

By Garrick Utley

NEW YORK (CNN) -- When people starve, when they bleed in the crossfire of civil war, do outsiders have the humanitarian duty to intervene?

In Somalia, the United States said yes.

When a centuries-old blood feud turns to mass murder and ethnic cleansing, is it wise for outsiders to try to stop it?

In Kosovo, the United States decided, reluctantly, that it was.

And when we see genocide, do we act?

In Rwanda, 800,000 people were slaughtered. The United Nations, the United States and others could have intervened to save many of those lives, but did not.

Though there was an apology, four years later.

"I have come to pay the respects of my nation to all who suffered and all who perished in the Rwandan genocide," said President Bill Clinton.

Rwanda, Kosovo, Somalia, or wherever the dilemma of intervention may confront us in the future, are places and problems far from our daily lives.

And even if we share a human desire to protect life anywhere, would we do it?

If you are walking down a street and just ahead you see someone being robbed or beaten up, and no one is doing anything to stop it, would you act? Would you get others to join you in stopping the crime, run the risk of getting hurt or killed?

We like to think we would.

In December 1992, the United States led an international force to restore peace and feed people in Somalia. The risks appeared to be small.

"The Somalia intervention seemed so simple," said Michael Maren, who served in the Peace Corps in East Africa, then worked for humanitarian aid efforts in Somalia before the intervention.

And what the Bush administration was looking for at that time was to create a system through the United Nations, through which the world could do these kinds of humanitarian interventions.

"It did stop the fighting, it did bring a period of peace to Somalia for a matter of months," said Maren. "What it did not do was solve the underlying problems that had caused the fighting to begin with."

The problem of chaos and fighting between rival clans is war lords fighting for power and wealth, and to control food, which is power.

"If you have a bad war lord somewhere causing trouble and you send food into the people who are starving," said Maren, "it is going to go to the warlords. Men with guns always eat first."

American commanders in Somalia soon realized that their humanitarian mission could not succeed unless they dealt with the men with the guns.

When U.S. Rangers moved against the forces of the most powerful warlord, Mohammed Farah Aideed, his men shot down two helicopters.

Suddenly humanitarian help had a human and highly visible price. Eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed that day. American forces were called home.

Is saving lives abroad, in a conflict that does not directly affect the United States, worth even one American life?

"For an American president, it requires the kind of leadership to be able to say to the American people, 'There is a crisis in Sierra Leone, there is a crisis in Bosnia, there is a crisis in Albania, wherever we are thinking of going, and we are going in there because it is the right thing to do and, yes, American lives may be lost in this process,'" said Maren.

But for those who make the decisions and must answer to the families of those Americans killed, it is not always clear, as in Somalia, what the "right thing" to do is.

"We made a terrible mistake by getting in there and then trying to resolve the whole crisis," said Lawrence Eagleburger, who was involved in many interventions in a State Department career which culminated as Secretary of State.

"I understand the desire to stop these awful conflicts, these murders and so on, there is no argument there," said Eagleburger. "The problem is that in many cases, when we become involved that way for humanitarian purposes, we find ourselves ending up in a swamp from which it is very hard to extricate ourselves."

True enough, but here is another question. If the United States, or any member of the United Nations, is reluctant to sacrifice the lives of its own citizens in order to save lives elsewhere, how many lives are we prepared to see lost by not acting?

One thousand? One hundred thousand? One million?

That question, and the lack of any answer, resonates painfully in the U.N. Security Council ever since what happened here in April 1994.

Rwanda is a tiny country in the heart of Africa, home to seven million people. Most called themselves Hutus. The other, smaller ethnic group, are Tutsis. Each holds grievances and grudges against the other.

Eight days after the final American troops pulled out of Somalia, the killing, the genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda began, ignited by Hutu leaders. It was an organized slaughter of men, women, children and babies.

"The rhetoric was extremely similar to that of Nazism: a final solution. We will have a final solution to the Tutsi problem and they identified all Tutsis as the enemy," said Philip Gourevitch, author of a book on the Rwandan genocide.

There was a U.N. military force in Rwanda, 2,500 strong, but no Americans were in it. Its mission was to monitor an uneasy peace, not to stop the killing. And yet the United Nations had been told what was coming, had been warned three months earlier by the U.N. commander in Rwanda, a Canadian General, who urged the U.N. to take action before the killing started.

In his book on the Rwandan genocide, Gourevitch investigated what happened to that warning.

"General Dellaire sent a fax to the U.N. headquarters, the peacekeeping headquarters, which was then run by Kofi Annan who is now secretary general," said Gourevitch. "It was addressed to Annan and it said, 'Listen, I have got this informant who is very highly placed and he is telling me that he is training men to kill Tutsis, he is registering every Tutsi in the greater Kigali -- that's the Rwandan capital -- in the greater area of Kigali, he is caching weapons, weapons are being acquired,' and the famous parts of this fax are, 'He says he believes it is for their extermination.' That is the word he used, the extermination of Tutsis."

But at U.N. headquarters in New York, in the peacekeeping office then headed by Annan, there was no appetite to take action to prevent the approaching human disaster.

"They said we knew that the great powers and specifically the United States would not have wanted us to do anything," said Gourevitch. "Because after Somalia there was a chilling effect on peacekeeping."

In that April of 1994, news in the United States included the death of Richard Nixon and Kurt Cobain. The Clintons were defending their Whitewater investments and unemployment was down to 6.4 percent.

If you listened carefully, Rwanda was in the news, but still, no action was taken.

The Clinton administration even put out a directive saying that the word "genocide" should not be used by government officials.

At a State Department briefing on April 28, 1994, spokesperson Christine Shelly was asked, "Does the State Department have a view as to whether or not what is happening could be genocide?" Shelley said, "Well, as I think you know, the use of the term genocide has a very precise legal meaning, although it is not strictly a legal determination. There are other factors in there as well. When in looking at a situation to make a determination about that, before we begin to use that term, we have to know as much as possible about the facts of the situation."

But the Clinton administration was receiving intelligence reports on the killing as were other governments who could have called for armed intervention. By May, the death toll reached into the hundreds of thousands.

There was one early intervention in Rwanda. European troops flew in to evacuate their citizens, as well as 255 American civilians in Rwanda.

At the U.N. Security Council, on May 17, 1994: "Mr. President, the cries of the victims of Rwanda have been heard calling upon the Security Council to act. The sheer magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in that tragic country demands action."

But there was still no action. And there would be none.

"I think we were right to stay out and it has got nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin," said Eagleburger. "It has to do with geography, our ability to effect events when we went in, how many troops we would have had to put in there to make it work."

Only a few thousand troops, critics say, if they had intervened quickly to seize weapons and stop the killing.

More than five years later, in December 1999, the United Nations report, commissioned by now Secretary General Kofi Annan, said the genocide in Rwanda was allowed to happen because there had been a "failure of the United Nations system as a whole," there had been "a lack of resources and a lack of will..." to take on the commitment.

And because "Rwanda was not of strategic interest... and that the international community exercised double standards," the report concluded.

That and more, no doubt, was on President Clinton's mind when he went to Rwanda in 1998.

All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror," Clinton told an audience of several hundred, including many survivors of the genocide.

"There is a big debate you will hear about -- the world failed to do more in Rwanda," said Gourevitch. "But to talk about failure suggests that they attempted to do something and did not succeed. And in fact what they attempted to do was [to] do nothing, that was the policy, and they succeeded."

And so what should the "policy" of the next president be? Should the United States intervene in a human crisis and put American lives at risk only when it involves the security of the United States itself?

In the Gulf War, after all, were American and coalition forces more interested in liberating Kuwait from Saddam Hussein or in liberating oil?

In Bosnia, and again in Kosovo, it was difficult to distinguish between the humanitarian act and the political need to defend NATO's authority in Europe.

In Haiti, military intervention to create stability in that impoverished nation, was also motivated by the growing number of desperate Haitian refugees arriving on the Florida coastline.

"We have to be, I think, prepared to intervene, to go, not to be the world's policeman, but occasionally [to be] the world's policeman," said Eagleburger. "It is when we get drawn into thinking that we have to intervene in every case everywhere every time, that will very fast wear out as far as the American people are concerned, and it should. That is not our role."

In the end, it is leadership that counts, a president who can move a nation to take action, or not to.

"If you were to look back at the eight years of the Clinton administration and start talking about moral failing, most people would immediately go to the White House intern," said Maren. "The largest moral failing during the eight years of the Clinton administration was the failure to intervene in Rwanda."

More than half a century ago when the world discovered the horror of the Holocaust, vows were made ... "Never again."

But mass murder has happened again and again, from the killing fields of Cambodia to Rwanda to Sierra Leone to East Timor. When it happens, there are good reasons to act and understandable reasons not to, in the full knowledge of the eternal observation that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing."