Bush Senior on Rwanda

some people (Including myself) seem to think that Bush Senior would have sent soldiers to Rwanda during the Genocide.

What would he have really done had he won the second term?
 
some people (Including myself) seem to think that Bush Senior would have sent soldiers to Rwanda during the Genocide.

What would he have really done had he won the second term?
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to match the reality of the situation. George Bush Sr. was against U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia, and he was most certainly against U.S. intervention in Somalia. In fact, General Colin Powell and Dick Cheney were often the strongest critics of intervention on a "humanitarian mandate"....
 
some people (Including myself) seem to think that Bush Senior would have sent soldiers to Rwanda during the Genocide.

What would he have really done had he won the second term?
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to match the reality of the situation. George Bush Sr. was against U.S. intervention in Yugoslavia, and he was most certainly against U.S. intervention in Somalia. In fact, General Colin Powell and Dick Cheney were often the strongest critics of intervention on a "humanitarian mandate"....
 
If he did send troops it would only make the situation worse in the long run. By that I mean US troops would have forced the Tutsi led RPF(Rwandan Patriotic Front)to agree to a ceasefire with the Hutu dominated Rwandan National Army. This would lead to most of those responsible for the genocide remaining in power in a power-sharing government.

On the other hand a forced ceasefire would mean no Hutu exodus into Congo and consequently more stability there.
 
If he did send troops it would only make the situation worse in the long run. By that I mean US troops would have forced the Tutsi led RPF(Rwandan Patriotic Front)to agree to a ceasefire with the Hutu dominated Rwandan National Army. This would lead to most of those responsible for the genocide remaining in power in a power-sharing government.

On the other hand a forced ceasefire would mean no Hutu exodus into Congo and consequently more stability there.

i thought the CIA were backing the RPF. IMO, if Bush did win and did send troops, theyd help the RPF.
 
Yes the US did back the RPF while the French supported the RNA, but any deployment of US troops is likely to be under a UN mandate which would undoubtedly include a ceasefire resolution(under threat of French veto). So while many Tutsi would be saved many Hutu conspirators would also remain in power at least initially. France would also attempt to block a UN tribunal to punish the war criminals.
 
i thought the CIA were backing the RPF. IMO, if Bush did win and did send troops, theyd help the RPF.
RPF was funded only through covert funding. Second, as Bush would later say about Somalia, Yugoslavia, Haiti, and Rwanda, the situation was purely an "internal matter". He pointed out often, the United States is "not in the business of nation-building..."
 

MacCaulay

Banned
some people (Including myself) seem to think that Bush Senior would have sent soldiers to Rwanda during the Genocide.

What would he have really done had he won the second term?

There were a lot of ancillary things going on during '94.

In his book Shake Hands With the Devil, Brig. Gen. Romeo Dallaire (the UN force commander) made a lot of points about the UN heirarchy, and how the ability to build a force to send to Rwanda was underfunded from the outset and also hurt from the fact that most countries willing to go were already overtaxed with peacekeeping missions.

When the Department of Peace Keeping Operations (the actual organization in the UN that puts those things together) began putting the UNOMUR mission together, they had Dallaire, Maurice Baril (his civilian counterpart), and...that was it. They literally had one phone and nothing else to work with.

I've got a fair amount of books sitting right behind me in my den, and each one of them has horror stories of the UN screwing peacekeepers in the field, with the DPKO being the phallus.
But it's what they've got to work with, and it's done great things as well as terrible things, so you've just got to go with it.

When all was said and done, UNOMUR went in with a Canadian command group, a Belgian battalion (which didn't turn out well), and motorized units from Ghana and Bangladesh.
The Belgians were not the first pick. They were just about the last, seeing as they had been the former colonial rulers and that's normally a non-starter for picking peacekeeping forces. That's an emotional issue, and the last thing you need going into an African war zone is the white guys who used to run the place.
After a few months and over a dozen deaths, the Belgians were unilaterally pulled out by their government. By this point, what we know now as the Genocide was beginning. The RPF was closing in around Byumba, south of Kigali.
The Canadian Airborne Regiment was airlifted in as quickly as possible once everything started going down hill, but by the time they'd arrived the situation had detiorated past the point of no return.


And when all of this happened, what most of the world was watching was the OJ Simpson trial. And when they saw those images, most people in America (including the Republicans in Congress) were thanking God they hadn't gotten involved in that, especially after Somalia.
 
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