At a campaign stop in Iowa in December 2007, Bill Clinton
told
a gathering of potential caucus-goers that Hillary advocated the use of
U.S. troops to stop the genocide in Rwanda. When asked whether it was
true, Hillary Clinton replied
with an unequivocal, "It is."
We're hardly in a position to dispute a private conversation between
Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is worth noting, however, that the
conversation doesn't seem to have had any sort of verifiable effect. The
conversation is not recorded in the memoirs of either Clinton. And there
is no record of the former president raising the possibility of
deploying troops with any of his advisers. Prudence Bushnell, the State
Department official who held the Rwanda portfolio during the Clinton
administration, told the Tribune that the U.S. did not ever
consider a military intervention in Rwanda. Bushnell is not affiliated
with any campaign. For that matter, the U.S. took an active
role in removing the few international peacekeeping forces
that had been in place. According to an article in The Atlantic
by Samantha Power of Harvard (and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning
book on America's role in combating genocide), "staying out of
Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective." Power, of course,
was an Obama adviser until her celebrated reference to Clinton as a
"monster," but Power's article was written in September 2001
– well before Obama ran for the U.S. Senate.
