Rubin's a liar from way back -- he was the State Department's Official Spokesman at the end of the Clinton Administration.
It was always somewhat disturbing to me that after his few years under the bright lights, he ended up married to CNN's Christianne Amanpour.
Not exactly as bizarre as James Carville and Mary Matalan finding connubial bliss, but in a way almost as unusual, ethics-wise.
Wesley Clark, on the other hand, as a relatively young officer, in Vietnam, secured his future when he accepted the responsibility for documenting the U.S. Army's official history of the
My Lie Massacre.
...But to get back to Samantha Power & Rwanda -- in a somewhat roundabout way -- I have always thought Philip Gourevitch's
We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With our Families was *the* landmark, on-the-ground-and-up-close-and-personal history of what happened in Rwanda, in the mid-90's. (Better than Power's or Dallaire's.)
Gourevitch took over for George Plimpton as editor of the
Paris Review. With much of that book originally published in the
New Yorker, you know he's a very good writer. It was sometimes rough going, but I originally thought *very* highly of his book, and the job he did in traveling the country and finding real people to interview, both Tutsi and Hutu, and the selected bits and morsels of history that he wove together as a background.
However, ever since I found out that Gourevitch was married to State Department ex-spokesperson Jamie Rubin's sister (Elizabeth, also a writer), questions that never occurred to me while I was reading
We Wish to Inform You, suddenly came back to me. (And they're even more troubling, in light of Wesley Clark's and Jamie Rubin's obvious duplicity, today.)
Who paid for the damned radio stations, broadcasting the killing messages? Who brought in all the machetes? In the book, the chief Hutu propagandist is named and described, with a fairly complete summary of some of his writing, but he's clearly identified as being second string, someone who took orders and obeyed.
The Hutu's are identified, just as clearly, as the instigators of the genocide, but...
- why?
- who shot down the President's plane?
- who paid for what?
- who benefited?
are questions left unanswered...
The War in the Congo that's consumed 6 million lives is a continuation of the Rwandan War. It started out as a cross-border Tutsi/Hutu sorting out, with many hundreds of thousands still living under U.N. auspices. While we're not seeing many hundreds of thousands of people hacked to death every month, the on-going, continuing slaughter (in the complete absence of media scrutiny/oversight) is deeply troubling.
The timing of the Rwandan genocide -- with the President-for-Life for the Congo, the monster who succeeded Patrice Lumumba clearly on his way out -- is a little strange, too.
As Gourevitch documented in the book, with a personal tour (how did he end up there?) of Mobutu Sese Seko's abandoned mansion, in the Congo (so many poetic, decadent life-style details from the rubble and wreckage therein), the handwriting was clearly on the wall. A power vacuum, just waiting to be filled, that could not be left to collapse of it's own accord.
I'm left wondering what the ties were between the Rwandan Patriotic Front, and the U.S.? General Kigame was trained by the U.S. Army. (He was in the U.S. when the genocide began, or just before it started.) Did the RPF have the benefit of satellite and other intelligence, from the Americans, in beating back numerically superior Hutu forces? To what extent was Military Professional Resources, Inc., involved?
The Congo is one of the richest pieces of real estate on the planet. There are minerals there, obtainable no where else on earth, without which you simply can't make a cell phone...
...On the other hand (I'm just thinking out loud here), the current American/Western plan for Africa clearly leaves something to be desired. I just happened to read this article, the other day, thanks to the folks at the "Scoop Independent News" site.
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=545&Itemid=1Excerpt:
"Since the end of the Cold War, under Democrats and Republicans alike, the US has provided tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid, military training and arms transfers to 50 of the 54 nations in Africa. America's militarized foreign policy has transformed Africa into the poorest and most war-ravaged continent on earth, with several armed conflicts raging at any one time over the last two decades, and American arms and training a factor in at least one of each. It is the militarization of US policy toward Africa that has manufactured the "failed states" which, like the Congo are ideal for the extraction of African resources, as well as the desired excuses for further military intervention..."...OK, cutting to the chase:
I wasn't at all surprised, today, to read Wes Clark's and Jamie Rubin's thoroughly nasty comments. It's actually very disheartening to imagine that such smart, well-put-together, well-educated -- and Democratic -- spokespeople could be so small, spineless and self-serving. When it comes to American foreign policy, though, I suspect it's only the very small tip of a very large, very deeply submerged iceberg.
Counter-argument, also possible:
(Sure, it's possible that with a week's delay between the original interview with The Scotsman, and the actual, finally released revelation that she used the "M" word to describe Hillary, there was something else going on inside the Obama campaign. Maybe someone decided Ms. Power didn't have enough sand in the bucket, when it came to serving as a counterweight to Hillary's dozen generals, all in a row in front of the cameras. So she ended up under the bus, a decision regretted by all, but tactically acceptable to everyone -- including maybe even Ms. Power. Seen in that light, Clark's and Rubin's comments could be a really acid vintage of sour grapes, reflecting as much disappointment -- last chance to pile on -- as "outrage.")
Either way:
In the near term, there is likely to be NO END in sight, when it comes to the total lack of information Americans have about what really goes on in the rest of the world. (That probably goes double, triple, and several more orders of magnitude, squared, for places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.)
...Forgive me for thinking out loud, or in this case, through my fingers on the keyboard.
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