shared respect and admiration and affection we have for one another and the countries and their abiding friendship. >> you are watching american history tv. 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3. follow us on twitter. for information on our schedule, upcoming programs, and to keep up with the latest history news. >> next, john rightly talks about american involvement in late 20th century international crises like the genocide in rwanda and conflicts in somalia. he describes how well-intentioned international efforts can destabilize countries and create additional problems. he specifically looks at u.s.

intervention in africa and asked how missions changed over the course of involvement, ranging from peacekeeping to nationbuilding. this class is about an hour. >> good afternoon. this is my favorite lecture of the semester by far. it is one we never had about 20 years ago. the basic question in front of us is -- when do u.s. policymakers consider a humanitarian invention? when are we willing to put your lives and your money at work for foreigners? over risk. some of the basics, let me turn to do -- what are the key factors we think of from the very start in terms of whether the united states is willing to intervene in bosnia-herzegovina or libya? what key factors might drive us? key variables we have looked at so far? kurt? >> human rights violations. >> human rights violations. so the scale of the crisis might matter in all this.

right? our model might predict that the higher level of crisis, the more threats, the more violations, like places like former yugoslavia, were more likely to get in. excellent. please? >> a calculation of whether it will directly or indirectly affect us, affect our interests? >> our interests. what do you mean by that? >> like, say, the strategic interests -- like our oil supply, obviously. national oil supply. we do not what prices to go up. that is kind of important to us. >> so, larger geocentric issues are in play here. issues about things like -- russia's position vis-à-vis syria. are we willing to convene and call it humanitarian intervention when in reality, we are concerned about classic economic interests or regional

stability interests -- yeah, i can see it. what about domestic variables? what else can matter there, the domestic side to the equation? mario? >> maybe there is a voter group that is having influential opinions? >> public opinion. interest groups. awesome. what else? >> domestic economic interests. >> ok, economic interests. one last one. >> [indiscernible] public opinion of, like, americans, so we would probably be more likely to enter a war if the "new york times" or something of that sort was ising us information that detrimental. >> awesome. cnn. to what extent is the media covering this, influencing policymakers to make decisions they might not otherwise do. maybe there is a relationship with public opinion. maybe there is a relationship

with elections going on. what i want to get at, let's pick up where we left off last class and think about the gulf war. let's think about the new world order and how these variables come into play during this humanitarian crisis. some matter more than others. i do not have a master formula for you. i don't think one exists. i do not have a classic analysis where one side of the equation -- this degree of media coverage plus public opinion is going to yield a tight correlation of whether we are going to intervene. but i think we can do, why starting to look at the gulf for , the events following that, looking at case studies, tease out different interplays with these variables. and we will end the class and talk about intervention in syria. intervention in sierra leone. intervention in iraq. etc.

so let's begin. remember, last class we were talking about the gulf war. unexpected war in a lot of ways. unexpected victory in a lot of ways. in all the good ways, right? we win the war quickly, have a quick peace accord. and all of a sudden, we have a pause. right? president bush calls for a kurdish uprising. right? he calls for iraqis to take back their country, right? and they do that. what happens, of course, is saddam hussein pushes back. we know that he is allowed to keep his attack helicopters. we begin to turn them on the kurds. what looks like a fantastic victory now has an ugly feel about it. right? we have potentially millions of kurds now fleeing northern iraq. right? and they are fleeing -- take a look at the slide. regions here in northern iraq, desperately trying to get out in both directions.

desperately trying to get out to turkey. turkey quickly closes the borders. they are not looking for a million kurdish refugees to join, right? and all of a sudden we have possibly hundreds of thousands, if not millions, total innocent iraqis we encouraged to rise up against saddam hussein who might die. this is the new world order? this is how we want to react? and we mentioned this a second ago, talking about the news media. the news media coverage of the gulf war. stationed in saudi arabia -- they are still in the region and they hear the story. and now they cover the story, and carry the story, not just to the american people, but the british people, to the british public. and all of its sudden, britain and the united states is faced with this humanitarian crisis leastn some ways feels at

a little bit of our making. how are we going to react? our reaction is salient. our reaction in a lot of ways is breaking here. for the first time in modern history, we pass a you win -- a u.n. security council resolution, right? we call a humanitarian crisis, the kurdish humanitarian crisis, a threat to regional peace and security. we ask saddam hussein to stop repressing his people and we authorize countries to protect the kurds. this turns out mostly to be a british mission. most of the boots on the ground will be british. but the air power is supported by the united states. and with the setup of safe havens in northern iraq, what became a crisis becomes an opportunity for success. we largely save the refugees from starving and freezing in

the mountains. the exact opposite happens. you can tell from the picture there. curtis -- kurdish refugees with the usaid logo on them. we become the good guys again. we save the refugees ultimately. we have an opportunity to feel good about ourselves. we are defining ourselves in positive ways. if we start at this moment and look at the literature coming out of the united nations -- boutros boutros-ghali, agenda for peace. eventually candidate, then president bill clinton talking , talking about using the united nations in different ways. some type of rapid reaction force. the secretary-general calling for a standing army. maybe this can be replicated. maybe we are not damned ultimately to have these humanitarian interventions. maybe there's something we can learn about ourselves. the conflicts are continuing. interstate conflict begins to die off.

notice the red here. diminishes, diminishes. 1991 to the end of the cold war. intrastate conflict is going up and up and up. we increasingly get ourselves challenged. civil war wars throughout africa challenging us and challenging this purpose. we start feeling a little guilty. here i'm going to personalize it a little bit. the united states is doing well. we are feeling good about ourselves. we are thinking we won the cold war in a lot of ways. we get these ubiquitous commercials going on. for 98 cents, won't you save this poor child? isn't it worth it for you? you know the one i am talking about. i flip the channel. the guilt, right? kevin carter, a pulitzer prize winning photograph here, taken in sudan in 1993. a sudanese boy, and notice the vulture behind him there.

it bothers everybody. this photograph is very contentious. there are different accounts of how this photograph was taken and ultimately carter committed suicide not long after he won the pulitzer. his suicide note named a lot of reasons, but he was haunted by the images he saw there. you see an image like that, who doesn't want to make things better? who doesn't feel bad? so you start asking yourself some really basic questions. if these are human beings -- they are, right? that is a person. and we can help. the cold war is over. these are unipolar moments. can we do this? do we have the ability to do this? can we help everyone? can we pick and choose? under what criteria do we decide to have humanitarian intervention? i think we come back to all of those variables we started our conversation with, right? how big is the crisis? how severe?

how many rapes are too much, right? what is the threat in the region to us? how far can we spread ourselves? where is public opinion on this? where is the news media on this? we are trying to figure this out on the fly. there is not a game plan for this sitting around in washington, d.c. right? that's how we will begin. let's think about looking at two crises to illustrate. quintessential humanitarian crises. let's begin by looking at africa and by looking at somalia. the first thing, i'm going to talk about africa and somalia here. we talk about the horn of africa here. it is like a rhino's horn. look how big it is. it is mind-boggling to us. our typical maps do not do us justice. they flatten, right? this is from the economists.

you get a sense of -- we're talking about intervening in somalia, how much territory we are actually dealing with. you could effectively, if you just articulated the countries, you could fit china, the united states, india, mexico -- there are examples of all the combinations you can get in all of africa. obviously on our maps, africa looks slightly larger than greenland. not, clearly, the case here. looking at roughly about 40% the size of india. this is a very serious challenge for the united states, obviously. our action here is going to be mogadishu in the southern part of somalia. we will talk about the humanitarian crisis circa 1989, and it will continue to about 1995. we will start there, shoots south, and go into kenya. they call this the triangle of death, where the worst humanitarian crisis at the time was taking place. let's look at what we decide to do. this is an oversimplification, right?

this is not the history of somalia. there are lots of things that caused the humanitarian crisis in somalia. i can hit a couple of the quick ones here. michael maron wrote a really neat book. very controversial book. the aid community hated it. it is called "road to hell." he wrote a couple of pieces in popular literature, including i believe "rolling stone." he worked in the aid community for a number of years, and he charged from his experience in that part of the reason we had a humanitarian crisis in somalia was because somalia became addicted to humanitarian aid ultimately. the story therefore goes to the relationship between somalia and ethiopia. if i can backtrack -- this region west of somalia is called , and both region ethiopia and somalia laid claim

to it. simple version there. siad barre is a dictator. in the 1970's, he realizes he has an opportunity. there is discord in 1974 and 1975. there was a coup in ethiopia. he was deposed, and he is going to take advantage of this and invades the western part of ethiopia and claim somalia itself. this causes problems for the soviet union. the soviet union, on the one hand, was allied with siad barre. and ultimately, ethiopia might be a much more valuable partner to the soviet union. so in machiavellian politics, the soviet union dumps somalia and joins on the ethiopian side. it immediately gave them huge amounts of aid. sent military soldiers. 18,000 cuban soldiers to defend

ethiopia. all of the sudden, an aggressive war that siad barre thought he was going to win easily in ethiopia, it looks like he is going to get waxed. immediately, his troops have to withdraw. he is with strong back into somalia. what do you think you do? somebody help me out. if you are a somali, one of the tribes of somalia, and you live in ethiopia, and ethiopia just invaded somalia, but now they are losing the war. and here comes the ethiopian military. what do you suspect you do? >> you immediately head for somalia territory. >> you run away. you know really bad things are going to happen to you. the international community responds. they set up refugee camps, and they become permanent camps.

people who were once nomadic people who are very, very self-sufficient, who dealt with lots of droughts throughout the years, are all of the sudden living in refugee camps. one of the unique things about refugee camps, particularly at the time, food is provided for you. if food is provided for you, are you likely to grow food? or produce food? of course not. and very quickly, the country becomes addicted to foreign aid. some estimates put 30% of the country's population directly dependent on foreign aid by the mid-1980's. if you are going to eat, food has to flow in. compounding the situation, the exceptional number of arms in somalia that helps drive the conflict overall. somalia was a satellite state of the soviet union. so they received all of the aid that way. jimmy carter decided after the

soviet union started to fund it gop is that -- started to fund ethiopia that somalia would be ok for us to support after all, and somalia became the third largest recipient of aid from the united states of america. just behind israel and egypt. huge amounts of american weapons were shipped to somalia as well. here's the picture i am painting here. lots and lots of people depending on foreign aid. lots and lots of weapons under control of a dictator who is going to be challenged in 1988. and his people are going to rise up against him. they are going to devolve into civil war. and it is a nasty civil war going in a multiple of different directions and across different tribes. we started walking to the one -- and immediately we start walking to the worst humanitarian crisis of the day.

the numbers are difficult to know. they were nothing but guesstimates at the time. anywhere from 2 million to 3 million people are going to be dead. the united nations is going to report that 2000 people are going to be dying every single day. that's an amazing number. the united nations has an estimate of children five or younger by 1991, 1/5 of them already dead. it looks like this country is going to implode on a level we've never seen before. so when the worst humanitarian crisis sitting on our door here, how are we going to respond? of course, this is now being overlapped by the gulf war. right after those events. the initial response is very meek, very meager. the united nations authorizes unosom. does anyone know what that stands for? united nations operations in somalia, right?

this is a classic peacekeeping operation, for those of you who know the difference. this is a blue helmet operation where they come there only with the permission of the somali government. and they are delivering the humanitarian food that is now getting jacked up at the mogadishu harbor. right? they cannot get out to the refugee camps. of course, there is no central government. the united nations is dependent on all of these different warring groups ultimately to give them permission to come in. you can imagine how well that is going to go. right? not so great. ultimately, only 50 pakistani soldiers make it into mogadishu. they are denied access and the right to deliver the food. what looks like a horrible situation is starting to look even worse. it looks like 60% of the population will die. huge, unthinkable numbers. then the united states does the unimaginable.

unimaginable from the policy community and clearly unimaginable for the academic community. we lead ultimately what is called unitaf. anyone know what that stands for? i will give you a hint. u-n does not stand for u.n. it is an important distinction between the two missions. any guesses? u-n-i-t. close. united intervention force. united. because this is a us-led -- u.s.-led mission. this is not a touchy-feely peacekeeping mission. we are not going there with permission to be there. if you remember some of the literally, the marines are coming in from the beaches with the cameras there to catch it. they're coming with very aggressive rules of engagement. you can read some of them up there.

they have the right to defend themselves if they are attacked. they are not going to duck and cover. these are u.s. marines. they just got done fighting the gulf war. they are not going to let some 18-year-old thugs who are likely stoned on a narcotic they chew, right, threaten them. so the u.s. comes in as a robust military mission into somalia and it is, by any measure, a tremendous success. it goes in, almost immediately the starvation stops. because the marines are largely unchallenged, right? it is a fairly simple thing to move food from boats onto trucks and trolleys to get them into relief camps. almost immediately the mission begins to do what we think the mission should do. let's pause for a second. why did this happen? we can think of the cnn effect. certainly, public perception at the time that perhaps the news

media brought us there. but there were studies done. they say, what is the role of the news media here? did news media bring us to somalia or did policy makers use the news media to get our attention so they could have operations in somalia? let's dive down a second. before i go to the june 5 ambush and the black hawk down event -- i think we are all somewhat familiar with the movie. if you have not seen it, see it. i think it is a pretty good flick overall. look at some people and what roles they played in this crisis overall. lots of actors, right? in the readings, herman cohen kind of walked through in exceptional detail. in the u.s. government, at all levels, there are players, sort of the deputy level or below, trying to get the principal policymakers' attention. there are people against this

intervention. do not want it to happen. they see risk there. they see beyond u.s. national interests. they have doubts about the united nations' efficacy and ability to carry out these missions. then you have people like jim bishop, who did what they can to pull policymakers there. we get a sense of that bureaucratic game we talked about. let's look at the opponents. everybody is trying to scramble to get this down. slides will be coming in, i promise you. let's look at the actors. we can look at john bolton, who you may recognize, right? he was one of the famous counters in the hanging chad election. bush v gore. he was one of the chad verifiers. perhaps you remember him there. and, of course, he was the ambassador to the united nations under bush 43.

kind of a well-known person. i interviewed him about this. what was the u.s. policy? i thought his answer was revealing. there is never any agreement about providing -- disagreement, rather, about writing humanitarian assistance. everyone on every level of the government said we do not want starving babies. we do not want starving africans. that is not what we are about. we do care. this was setting up a legitimate debate. however, his real problem, his real issue, was the united nations. if we turn this to the united nations, we ask them to do this, do we have the capacity? they do not have a standing army. they never tried in operation of the size and scope at this point. and he said, ultimately, i thought they could be effective at the basic role, but they were not going to be very good at the political level. he sort of predicted that if they go to the nationbuilding role, which we know they will do ultimately, they are going to do

in unosom ii, he says that he thought that it would fail. he is sort of pressing on that other big inhibitors -- this is point. going to be the defense department. dick cheney, in particular. secretary of defense. he was nice enough to go on the record a few times, do interviews on this. he made it very clear to me. it is a temptation to always go into these humanitarian crises. but he said, in essence, you have to have a mission objective. you have to know what it is going to look like at the end of the day. you cannot go in in a casual way. if you grind down you see the relationship of the defense department and their relationship to policymakers and , you see a great deal of resistance. here is a great example. at one point it was proposed the army could use apache helicopters to guard refugee camps, right? so they could at least make sure

those areas were safe. do you know what the army's original response was? somalia was too dusty. the apache helicopters would be at risk. why was that an odd statement to make? what war had we just fought? >> the first gulf war. >> right, which was a little dusty. in kuwait, the same helicopters were used there. i am not saying they are being disingenuous. i think this is very real. but they are also being pragmatic. know what you are asking for. you are asking them to put soldiers in harm's way and it was not something the defense department was particularly willing to do. however, we get policymakers trying to get people's attention. smith hempstone. perhaps the quintessential example. he wrote a book. he died recently. this is his famous journal. he had his moments. he was the editor of "the washington times." in his book, he lobbied, he very

much wanted to be the ambassador to africa. he got the ambassadorship to kenya. he is the ambassador to kenya during the some miley -- somali crisis. he starts actively lobbying working with some of those proponents like jim bishop and herman coen and james forbes woods back in d.c. to effectively bring a response, to try to get the united states to intervene. what he did was ingenious. whether or not it was a thing is a source of debate. he wrote a very long cable, called "the day in hell," from washington, d.c. it is a very long cable. it is very graphic. part of it is on my shoulder here. it is very poetic. written like a journalist, not like an ambassador.

what is unique about it, it shows up in "the washington post." someone leaks it to "the washington post." i have interviewed smith hempstone several times. he swears that he did not send it, he did not do it. it would be a very severe felony if he did. somehow this was ultimately leaked to "the washington post," and they ran it on the front page of the sunday edition style section. let's see what it says. "this place is a small piece of hell. my next stop is the compound of international compounds of the red cross. the camps doctors say of everyone thousand children under -- every 10,000 children under 10 children die every night. of a two-year-old baby that weighs 10 pounds must be very small. the children are like bony birds, with just a few ounces of flesh cloaking their bodies. their eyes unnaturally large and

luminous. they search languidly in the fold of their mother's clothes for a dug of milk, and finding none, look up without complaining." this will be on a scale unknown in kenya's history. he is painting apocalyptic figures. this appears in the style section, a widely read section, of "the washington post" on a sunday. this is the trigger effect, the cnn effect, we talk about so much. this is where we see the spike of coverage taking place. this is where we see public opinion begin to galvanize. prior to this, the american public did not know anything about somalia. we are largely unaware of this crisis. this brings the news media and perhaps triggers events so a policymaker can ultimately react. does that make sense? thoughts before i go further? i want to catch my breath for a second. obviously, the mission did not go as planned, right?

we know the story. we turned the mission over to the united nations, and it becomes a nation building exercise being led by boutros boutros-ghali. where they tried to bring democracy, where they try to remove some of the crime, decriminalize, bring down the light weapons through the country, disarm somalis. there is tremendous pushback. ultimately, pakistanian u.n. peacekeepers are attacked. the united states or the world put a bounty on the general's head. we have the epic attempt to arrest and capture. it ends up with several u.s. black hawk helicopters being downed. we have the largest firefight in u.s. history since vietnam with 18 soldiers perishing and another 80 being wounded and at

least 1000 somalis being wounded. and the united states and the world says, what just happened? how did we go from feeding people and helping everybody, just going there to be the good guys, to all of a sudden be in the midst of this? again, the news media seems to matter here. perhaps it was an impediment to the mission. not pushing but actually stopping. because as you know, cnn shows , the bodies, the body in particular, the airman being dragged through the streets. we see our shoulders dead, stripped naked, being tortured. others being held captive, right? we look at the humanitarian crisis and we say, ok, what did we learn from all this? what is possible? what lesson would you take away from this? when should we help? who do we help? what matters and what does not matter? is this something we can do?

this is not easy. -- is this easy? is this hard? you are a policymaker in 1993. how would you react to this? please. >> i would fear that it would be difficult to get the american public on board to support something like this again, so if i was trying to really push the initiative to have humanitarian efforts continue in different countries, with these images on screen of our people dying, of our people being dragged through the streets, i would find it was going to be difficult to convince people we should continue to do things like that. especially when it might be personal money they are investing or money the government ends up investing. that might concern people. so -- >> yeah, to illustrate the point, i used to work for a colonel who was deployed to somalia. he said his wife called him the

day after that happened and his wife said, what the hell are you doing there? you said you were just feeding people. come home. you know? confusion. how do you sell that to the american public here? are we really about being the world's policeman? those kinds of questions get raised. questions about the united nations. we turned that mission over to them. can they handle it? obviously, i am foreshadowing into rwanda here. a reluctance to count on the united nations there. a famous phrase comes out of this. an army captain stationed in bosnia-herzegovina watches what happens in somalia and says, the lesson we have learned here is to not cross the mogadishu line. that is the phrase that comes out of it. what it means is, we took sides in somalia. we said there are bad guys and good guys. the bad guy challenged us. we put a bounty on his head. we're going to arrest him. if we are just giving food, be neutral. we do not want to get in the

middle of all this. we are just try to keep babies from starving, right? we do not want to get into the domestic political context. as we turn to rwanda, this itsy-bitsy, tiny country in the middle of africa -- keep that in the back of your mind, because everyone here is familiar with rwanda. we all know the genocide that took place in 1994. we all have a sense of guilt, why didn't we do more? obviously with president kennedy -- president kennedy -- president clinton going to the airport and apologizing on behalf of the international community for not doing more. there is a context. this is post somalia. yugoslavia is erupting at the time. what happens? this is the capital. we are in particular going to

pay a point of emphasis to something that is often overlooked. we are going to spend a lot of time here, the northwest part. part of the lake is obviously rwanda, but the other part is zaire or congo today. there are a lot of things that go into this. economics, which i will not be able to go into here. leadership roles. on the most basic level, this was an ethnic conflict reinforced by colonial rule. the belgians were handed rwanda as a duty after world war i, right? the belgians cared a great deal about zaire. they had all those wonderful natural resources. rwanda did not really have anything. what does rwanda produce? does anybody know what the exports used to be?

some tin? zinc? coffee? to my personal preference, it's not very good. pretty bitter. they do not have diamond exports, huge resources of oil. the belgians looked at rwanda and they said, you know what? we want what is best for you. we do not want to be bothered by this. they adapted something called the hamitic thesis. anybody know what that is? it has a double coal origin to it. biblical origin to it. you can go back to the bible, noah cursing his grandson, the son of his son. it was really bad social science more than anything else. and it essentially said -- there are some races that are more advanced than other races. there were lots of measurements, ways to quantify these things. all of these simplistic measurements that said, you know what, we sort of correlate if you are a little taller, a little lighter skin, if you look

a little more european, you would tend to do a little bit more economically and a little better politically. in that sense, there were some races in better positions than others. the belgians use this. they said, we want rwandans to do what is best for rwandans. we want them to sort it out. we want the finest rwandans to roll the country. so they took the rwandans that looked like them or the most like them. that was the tutsis. they were the minority ethnic group in rwanda. around 8% or 12% of the population. they put them in charge or you can imagine what the majority population said about this. it to ben's -- it depends on the demographic numbers you want to use. maybe 85% of the population was hutu. you can imagine when the belgians leave and rwanda gained independence in 1981, ultimately

, we run into this problem. the tutsis who were in charge, what do you expect they do? they were in all the key positions in government, had all of the perks of government, what do you think they did? >> they are going to hide. >> they are going to hide. they are going to run away. the same story is going to take place here. they are worried about retribution. they will try to overthrow the government. this war is going to wage on and off for about 20 or 30 years without much success. 1990's things begin , to change. let me kind of fast forward here. there is a challenge by the rpf. there is a legitimate chance they will actually overthrow the government. a guy named paul kagame, who was

trained in the united states. the military rpf takes northern rwanda. it's a real chance for gains here. the government is willing to make a peace deal with the rpf. the united nations immediately sends a peacekeeping force, about 2500 troops, led, of course, by general dallaire. and you know what is going to happen. you know the story, right? we get the warnings. you know this story. general dallaire in a cable, clearly going to the deputy secto secretary general of peacekeeping operations, a guy named kofi annan at the time. it is public. i can e-mail it to you if you want. clearly stating he has actionable intelligence that it appears extremists within the

government are looking to take out extermination. they do not use the word genocide. against the tutsis. and he asks the permission of the united nations to confront these, right? confront the leaders. they might be willing to commit the genocide. we know this. we want to challenge this. and the simple version is, he is told to stand down. right? we are going to be neutral. we are learning lessons and we are applying lessons. we are only in rwanda to enforce a peace. let's not get into the business of calling people bad guys and good guys. the president's plane shot down april 6, 1994. this famous line that we know from "hotel rwanda," which is a true line. "it is time to cut down the tall trees." that is a euphemism for the tutsis who are a little bit taller. and the genocide begins.

it begins on a scale of unprecedented passion. efficiency the world had never seen before. these are satellite images. yell university -- yale university has a really nice genocide webpage that hosts a bunch of this. you get a sense of where the atrocities took place here. the blue dots are mass graves. red are memorial sites. green are areas where they fought back. you can see the entire country , in essence, is enfolded in this genocide. my question would be, why didn't we intervene? why was this genocide allowed to take place? a lot of things going on at the time. this was happening in plain sight. in one of the strangest things is, of course, the u.n. security council. who is a member of the un

security council at this time i'm a which makes it really strange? not the p5. the rotating 10. do you know which countries are on the united nation security council at this point? >> rwanda? >> rwanda is. they are there. the government was going to be tried for genocide on the un .n. security council. michael barnett details this so nicely here, a political scientist. some of the most surreal moments in international diplomacy. so much of this has been declassified. george washington university's national security archives holds a bunch of these. here are examples of some of the conversations being had. go down. the note -- the security council is perplexed, also because the rwandan sits there, albeit usually silent. a clear genocide is taking place. let's pause here.

april 25. we know the u.n. security council is saying clearly, a genocide is taking place. but they say it quietly. within themselves. no matter how one considers the numbers, it used to be some 1.2 million tutsi before the war, and certainly 100,000 of them have been killed off. going down. he talks about the rwandan ambassador. trying to make a compromise. i think this is such a compelling moment here, highlighted in yellow. "is this not as though we wanted hitler to reach a cease-fire with the jews?" that is in the middle of the genocide. the security council is reaching out to the rwandan delegation and saying, can we have a compromise here? can we stop killing so many so quickly? you can imagine the conversation with hitler in world war ii, right?

it becomes to some degree surreal. on our own side, the u.s. state department side, christine shelley being asked, you know, what is going on in rwanda? she says there are acts of genocide going on. the reporter asked, how many acts of genocide does it take to make a genocide? that's not a question i'm in a position to answer. do you have guidance on this? not to use the word genocide? she goes on to say -- i have guidance about lots of other things. ahy are we not calling this genocide? why are we saying "acts of genocide" instead? i know you know this. some of you have taken international law. >> because of the implications. >> what are the implications? >> essentially that there would be a responsibility to prevent genocide taking place. >> we said never again, right?

we kind of debated that at the time. but if this is genocide -- the reservation clauses in the genocide convention will make it a little more complicated in the international court of justice, but if this is genocide, the united states signed a treaty saying we are compelled to intervene when a genocide takes place. do we want to intervene in this genocide? somalia, bosnia-herzegovina. former yugoslavia. we are learning this is hard. but i think what we forget here, collectively, and i am as algae as anyone, we tend to say we did nothing. we sat back and watched. i do not think that is right. i think we took very active participation. and it makes us uncomfortable. one of the first things we did in early april, we got the ex pats out. we got the westerners out of rwanda. if you want, "ghosts of rwanda," "triumph of evil." "frontline" videos.

you can see the interviews and video. you can see the british and french military going through the countryside of rwanda and saving westerners. we intervened in rwanda. -- and the rwandan genocide. we got the white westerners out. we got the black westerners out. we got those with a u.s. passport and european passport out. it is important, because it shows an intervention was possible. of course, when the dutch are killed, we go from a mission of 2500 u.n. peacekeepers and dallaire is screaming he wants to intervene in this crisis -- to now reducing the force to well under 100. as the crisis escalates, we deescalate. we take out. we consider nonmilitary options.

there is a long list of these things. but, as you know, this genocide is only able to take place at such an intense level so quickly with use of the radio. it was used in coordinating this genocide. a simple thing we could have done is shut down the radio. right? why didn't we? tom, do you want to jump in or not? please, tom. >> issues like freedom of speech. >> yes, that was one of the primary questions that came up. freedom of speech. we should not intervene in an other country's right to have freedom of speech. other issues that came up? i lost the things somehow. another issue i lost my slide. -- another question, whether or not we have the technical ability to intervene in this genocide and the technical

ability to shut down the radio. there is congressional testimony on the record here. the human rights committee asked them to simply say, oh, can we intervene? any military said, yes, we can do this. we can shut down a radio station without taking lives. we can do this. but we do not know what frequency it is being broadcast from. and then the representative says, on the record -- 94.1, sir. we took the deliberate steps not to intervene. maybe that is the right answer. i am not arguing we should have intervened. i'm saying we saw horror. we knew it was there. and we said it was beyond u.s. national interests to go in there. ultimately, at the very end, we had an intervention. we had a brief intervention. we actually had two. the french will intervene in the southwest of rwanda, very successfully setting of zones, trying to police the area.

keep it free. they were largely unchallenged. but the u.s. operation is worthwhile. as soon as the rpf in july 1984 reached the capital, a new humanitarian crisis emerged. we go from a genocide where people are being butchered to a refugee crisis. all of a sudden, you are allegedly participating in the genocide throughout rwanda, and now the victims, the tutsi, are coming to power and they run away, right? and they will run away, you grab what you can, and you walk. and one of the largest refugee crises we have ever seen begin s to emerge here. some pictures. paul kagame, get out of here. a picture of the refugee camps. what obvious big concerns jump out at you? i have hundreds of thousands of

potential participants in the genocide now showing up on the border. what are some potential problems you might have there? obvious things. just look at the picture. what stuns you about this area? what would happen? please. >> sanitation issues, health issues. >> cholera, right? right away. clean drinking water. can you make this out? i know it is tough to see in the light we have in here. can you make this out? thankfully, it is not feces there. it is dark rock. volcanic rock. it is near a volcano. and right away we have basic problems with sanitation. you can't dig very well into volcanic rock, right? there is this massive fear that this will turn hundreds of thousands of refugees into victims of cholera, dysentery, i

-- horrible ways to die. the news media in south africa. covers the first free election of nelson mandela. they are now in africa and getting wind of this. and they are coming up to cover the crisis. i would urge you to take a look. this is not hard. lexis-nexis is fantastic. 1994. august, july, august 1994. you see the hyperbole that comes out of this. "time" magazine, the cover. "this is the beginning of the final days. this is the apocalypse." they are covering this in a way that they never covered the genocide. again, livingston and atkinson are good sources. there are a host of sources. there are a lot of studies on the content and level of coverage here.

the media were largely silent on the genocide. they are very loud and vociferous. with stars coming to this crisis and reporting it. they moved policymakers to action. president clinton. july 22 1994. , fantastic quote. "the flow of refugees across rwanda's border has now created what could be the world's worst humanitarian crisis in a generation." i see some of you snickered. except for that other one. i'm not throwing stones here. i'm really not. i think these are very, very difficult questions that policymakers have to answer in real-time. we're talking about putting u.s. military members and harm's way

-- in harm's way and we just learned two years earlier how disastrous that could be. what happened here? you try to help in somalia. up with dead u.s. soldiers and still thousands of somalians killed. rwanda, we stand by with the international community -- thinking broader than the united states. perhaps 800,000, some say 1.2 million people, will die. we then intervene after the genocide is over, to have one of the largest humanitarian relief operations and help save the perpetrators of the genocide as part of the operation. this is really hard stuff. let me pull this together here. a year before the rwandan genocide, president clinton opened the holocaust museum and

we said never again at the holocaust museum. right? and then a year later, it happens. let's think about this. let's pull this together as a group. when do we intervene? when should we intervene? when should we risk american lives, american blood? as a class, we have discussed these all semester long, from west africa, syria and iraq, central african republic to sudan. as a side note, the united nations has named four of those -- iraq, syria, central africa, and sudan, as a level three crisis, which is the highest level crisis they can give anything. we are looking at the highest number of refugees and international displaced people since world war ii. when should we commit our forces to intervene? what are those variables? public opinion?

ferocity of the crisis? should that be read triggering -- be the triggering point? or should we say we are not the world's policeman? what your thoughts? i think all of these are perfectly defendable. i see some of you shaking your heads. hi. please. >> i agree with the sentiment we cannot be the world's policeman, but when we have genocides or acts thereof, we cannot allow that to happen. when we can help, it's great. policemen -- not so much, and the conflicts going on right now -- when people are dying pointlessly and needlessly, we should definitely intervene, not to just stomp around and say, hey, you know, here we are. america is here.

not for any agenda. just purely to help. that is when we should be there. >> even at the cost of american lives? >> yeah. i mean, american lives -- they are people, too. american lives are no more superior than those in africa or the middle east. i mean, it is just a simple thing, helping out another human. >> it goes back to that picture in the beginning in your mind. ok. your colleagues want to jump in. i suspect they may disagree or even agree. kurt? >> from a personal point of view, our lives are equal, but when we are dealing with the united states government and they are -- their decision-making, i think they have to prioritize american lives. they should focus on public opinion and the international

interest. we are waiting for a united nation security council initiatives to go in and stop the genocide -- i think eventually when that failed, when that time passed, i think they started pushing for the united states to take action. but they waited first for public opinion to swing. >> i'm not arguing. i'm just try to understand. are you arguing that the united states should never intervene in a humanitarian crisis? it is not within our classic geostrategic interests? >> no, i am saying they should if public opinion -- >> if there is public opinion behind it and all that? >> and if the international climate is suiting. if all of the un security council says it is a terrible idea, i think we should definitely take heed. >> ok. that's an interesting position. i hear a lot about leadership there. we do not know about rwanda intuitively as a group, right?

paige, if you would -- i know it is in the back. i'm sorry. >> [indiscernible] or who we should end should not give aid to, because a picture can be worth a thousand words, but it might not necessarily tell the right story. >> what should be our compass? let me concede your point. whether i agree with it or not is beside the point. let's concede public opinion should not be the driver of a decision-making calculus. let's talk about the list from the beginning. what should be the calculus? what would you point to? >> i would say you have to understand where you are intervening first. sometimes that is a large thing we do not necessarily understand. >> isn't that hard? >> i would say it is definitely not an easy thing to do, but that definitely needs to be something that should be taken into consideration. >> what does the end goal look like? >> if you do not have a goal, a

plan, you do not have a purpose, so you are bouncing back and forth. you are not actually going to accomplish anything. >> i think maybe we are seeing that a little bit in south sudan right now where we are struggling with that policy. we only have two or three minutes left. camden, do you want to pull us to a head here? >> sure. i want to agree we should always intervene in humanitarian crises, genocides, things like that, but you look at iraq and afghanistan and libya, three places we intervened in the last decade or so. iraq is a failed state with ice -- isis taking up half the territory and the government failed to do anything at all. afghanistan's military budget is bigger than their gdp. they cannot sustain themselves. and libya is about to become a failed state. are we making things better by taking out oppressive regimes around the world?

you know, the question is not, should we do it, it is, can we do it? >> let's go back to the question. what can we do ultimately? i think you're conflating different missions a little bit. i'm not quite sure that afghanistan post-9/11 invasion was a humanitarian mission. but i get your point. the nationbuilding exercise at all. we have different ideologies here. good. that is what political science is all about. we have some good arguments and good points to some degree. the purpose of the classes not to bring you to one side or another. we can agree these are exceptionally hard lessons. next class will pick up on those >> you are watching american history tv, all weekend, every weekend