Everyone says history repeats itself. That's a good thing. Not that everyone says it - that's kind of annoying - but it's good that it repeats, since we can be a little more ready the next time. But the other advantage of history repeating is that it allows us to understand the past better. We can understand the emotions and motivations better by seeing them in light of current events.
In other words, I'm not going to waste time admitting I don't know what to do about Syria. Instead, let's use this opportunity to better understand Rwanda.
First of all, let me say that in Hindsight, we (the West) should have intervened. Not even wussy limited I-promised-no-boots-on-the-ground kind of intervention; I mean something decisive, likely at great cost to everyone involved. So to the many people who have criticized the West's actions (or lack thereof) I'm not going to disagree with that basic premise.
What I do have a problem with are the many people who turn that retrograde regret into a moral condemnation, implying that the correct course of action was obvious, that our inaction could only be due to apathy, self-interest, or racism. We should have known what was going to happen, so that proves the West doesn't care about Africans.
To anyone who still hangs on to that idea, I invite you to look at Syria today. See the confusion: We don't know how far each side will go. If we intervene on the side of the rebels, what will they go on to do? How much time does Assad have left, and how far will he go to keep power?
That uncertainty is how Rwanda looked twenty years ago. The powers that were at the time made a decision based on the situation and it turned out to be horrendously wrong. We should examine that incident and learn from it, but a wrong decision based on an uncertain situation is not an indication of laziness or prejudice.
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