Richard A. Clarke, Rwanda, and “Narcissistic Compassion”:
Curious Backdrop for the 9/11 Hearings
by Paul Street
www.dissidentvoice.org
April 10, 2004

In the first chapter of his excellent The Clash of Barbarisms: Sept 11 and the Making of the New World Disorder (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 2002), Gilbert Achcar reflects on the depressing contrast between the “exceptional intensity of the emotions elicited worldwide by the destruction of Manhattan’s Twin Towers” and the comparative paucity of global concern for victims of much larger – if less spectacular and instantaneous – catastrophes in the Middle East and Africa. Among the latter, Achcar includes three million people killed by war in Congo-Kinshasa between 1998 and 2001 and 2,300,000 sub-Saharan Africans who died from AIDS in the year 2001 alone.

Achcar finds it “indecent” and “revolting” that “the white world” is “thrown into convulsions of distress over the ‘6,000’ victims in the United States, while it can hardly gives a thought to Black Africa in its horrible agony.” Achcar describes this phenomenon as a form of what he calls “narcissistic compassion.” This is “a form of compassion evoked much more by calamities striking “people like us,” much less by calamities attacking people unlike us. The fate of New Yorkers in this case elicits far more of it than the fate of Iraqis or Rwandans ever could, to say nothing of Afghanis.” (Achcar, The Clash of Barbarisms, pp. 22, 24) And the “white world” largely sets the tone of disparate global caring capacity through its domination of corporate-planetary media!

For a curious example of what Achcar is talking, consider the case of celebrated (and ghost-white) White House defector Richard A. Clarke. Clarke left the Bush administration in outrage at Bush’s failure to recognize and act seriously on the threat of al Qaeda (both before and after 9/11) and at Bush’s determination to sacrifice U.S. troops in an invasion of Iraq that deepens the terrorist threat to Americans and steals resources away from combating than threat. It’s good that Clarke came out against Bush’s stupid and reckless foreign and security policies, which have in fact cost thousands of American lives. At the same time, it’s important to note – as I do in a recent ZNet Commentary (“Serve the Superpower”) – that Clarke refuses to acknowledge non-American victims of U.S. policy before and since 9/11. These invisible (for Clarke and too many other Americans) casualties include 1 million Iraqis killed by U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, tens of thousands of Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S. invasion, and the thousands of Afghan noncombatants killed in a post-9/11 attack that Clarke thinks was carried out too slowly.

All of which provides some fascinating context in which to revisit Samantha Power’s disturbing investigation of the U.S. role in the Rwandan genocide, summarized in a long article that was published and then largely forgotten, like so much else, in the terror-spectacle of September 2001. The article in question appeared in the respectable establishment journal Atlantic Monthly, under the provocative title “Bystanders to Genocide: Why the United States Let The Rwanda Tragedy Happen”. It was based on what Atlantic Monthly editors called “extensive interviews with scores of participants in the [U.S.] decision-making” and “analysis of newly declassified documents.”

The title was an understatement. Power showed that President Bill Clinton fell far short of the truth when he visited Rwanda in 1998 to admit that “the United States and the world community did not do as much as we should have done to try to limit what occurred.” “In reality,” Power shows, “the United States 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 of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in 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’” (Power, “Bystanders,” p. 2).

At a time when U.S. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice is (as I write these words) defending her beloved president from Clarke’s accusation that he failed to appreciate and act upon the al Qaeda threat, there’s an interesting principal perpetrator in Power’s story: Richard A. Clarke. Clarke, Power showed, was the leading policy actor behind the Clinton administration’s refusal to acknowledge and act against genocide in Rwanda. As special assistant to the president from the National Security Council and as official overseer of U.S. “peacekeeping” policy, Clarke was chief manager of U.S. Rwanda policy before and during the slaughter. And for Clarke, Power noted, “the news” of mass Rwandan slaughter “only confirmed [his] deep skepticism about the viability of UN deployments “and sparked his fear that UN failure could doom relations between Congress and the United Nations.” Clarke, Power showed, was a dark force behind U.S. rejection of an aggressive plan to save Rwandan lives put forth by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who commanded the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda at the time of the genocide. The empty U.S. proposal advanced by Clarke to counter Dallaire abandoned “the most vulnerable Rwandans, awaiting salvations deep inside Rwanda.” It falsely assumed (or pretended to assume) “that the people most in need were refugees fleeing to the border” and that they could actually make it to the border (p. 21). “My mission,” Dallaire told Power, “was to save Rwandans. Their [the U.S.] mission was to put on a show at no risk” (p. 22).

In the face of that Clarke-led mission, U.S. officials like Donald Steinberg and Joyce Lawson, a key State Department deputy who argued early on for the U.S. to “send in the troops,” were deeply frustrated by official U.S. bureaucratic inaction in much the same way that Clarke credibly claims to have been stymied by Bush and Rice et al. prior to 9/11. “Steinberg,” Power noted, “managed the African portfolio [a curious and revealing term, P.S.] at the NSC and tried to look out for the dying Rwandans, but he was not an experienced infighter and, colleagues say, he “never won a single fight with Clarke” (p. 15).”

Consistent with all this, Clarke was the “primary architect” of Presidential Decision Directive (PDD)-25, “a new peacekeeping doctrine” unveiled on May 3, 1994 (the genocide began the previous month). This directive “circumscribe[d] U.S. participation in UN missions” and “limited U.S. support for other states that hoped to carry out UN missions,” subordinating basic humanitarian concerns to cold calculations of global realpolitik and “U.S. interests.”

Clarke was certainly a key player in the Clinton administration’s initial determination to avoid what insiders called “the g-word” – genocide – in describing what was taking place in Rwanda. That determination emerged from U.S. fear that calling events by their real name would have morally and legally required the U.S. “actually do something” – the literal language of a Defense Department memo dated May 1, 1994 (Power, p. 13). Before the mass killing began, Clarke and his colleagues and subordinates in the NSC were scandalously oblivious to plentiful, widely available evidence indicating the terrible fate that lay around the corner for Rwanda’s Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

“It is not hard to conceive of how the United States might have done things differently,” Power concluded, noting that the Clinton administration could easily have:

● agreed to Belgian pleas for UN reinforcements prior to the genocide

● deployed U.S. troops to Rwanda once the mass killing had begun

● joined Dallaire’s forces

● intervened unilaterally (imagine) with UN Security Council support, ¡°as France eventually did in late June

● made the case to Congress that genocide was underway, that this reality challenged core American values and that U.S. forces could “stop the extermination of a people “at relatively low risk.”

None of these basic acts of civilized statecraft was carried out, thanks in part to the structurally empowered skepticism and stonewalling of Richard A. Clarke.

The current melodrama of the 9/11 hearings and the related Clarke revelations, which have scrupulously avoided the deepest issues behind the terrorist threat to America (U.S. imperialism and the related dangerous asymmetry of world power relations in an age of unchallenged U.S. military supremacy - see Street, “Serve the Superpower”) is taking place against a curiously unacknowledged backdrop. Ten years ago to the month, the government and many citizens of Rwanda initiated what Power rightly called “the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the 20th century” (p.1). This horrific mass butchery was deeply enabled by the Clinton White House through stubborn and systematic inaction, reflecting in part the successful “bureaucratic infighting” and moral vapidity of top White House imperial functionary Richard A. Clarke, the chief official accuser of pre-9/11 inaction in the White House. The mostly white American 9/11 victims of White House inaction in 2001 numbered between 3,000 and 4.000. The black Rwandan victims of White House inaction in 1993 and 1994 numbered 800,000.

The “horrible agony” of the second set of victims and the question of what might have saved them can hardly be discerned ten years out. It is lost among other things in the din of public distress over the comparatively small number of Americans who lost their lives on 9/11 and what might have saved them. It’s a chilling statement of the racially tinged difference between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims that permeates U.S. doctrine and the imperial pathology of “narcissistic compassion.”

Paul Street is an urban social policy researcher and freelance author in Chicago, Illinois. Visit his new blog, titled "Empire and Inequality,"at http://blogs.zmag.org/empire/. He can be reached at: pstreet99@sbcglobal.net

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