From the WSJ Opinion Archives
THE WESTERN FRONT
The 'Hotel' Lobby
After Rwanda and Iraq, Americans may demand more humanitarian interventions.
There's a scene in the movie "Hotel Rwanda" that might give American foreign-policy makers pause. The film is a true story set in 1994 during a brutal genocide that saw machete-wielding Hutu thugs slaughter perhaps 800,000 victims, mostly Tutsis. At one point an enraged group of Hutus drive a pickup truck up to the front gate of Hotel des Mille Collines. The hotel had become a haven for some 1,200 people, mostly Tutsis, and was protected by a small band of United Nation peacekeepers. One of the thugs--a muscular, shirtless man wearing a purple wig--hopped off the back of the truck and tossed a bloodied U.N. helmet at the peacekeepers. He was angry that he couldn't get near the refugees, so he taunted the blue-clad soldiers before jumping back on the truck and taking off down the road.
It was a moment when even doves would wish for a good man with a gun to stand up and do something. But there are no John Waynes in this story, only soldiers for the feckless U.N., who eventually abandon the Mille Collines and the people taking refuge there. There is one man who does stand up, however. Throughout the film hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina finds money and booze to bribe Hutu military leaders. He even manages to shame the international community into helping him, albeit only a little. The French, who had long supplied the Rwandan military, prevail upon the generals to leave the Mille Collines alone for a while. At one point, many of the refugees at the hotel are awarded visas and therefore able to flee the country. But throughout, it's clear the refugees are living on borrowed time. The Hutu generals are losing control, and the hotel could be the scene of a mass slaughter at any minute.
Mr. Rusesabagina's story proves that one man with courage can make a difference. Walking out of the theater after viewing the film, it's hard not to conclude that even the smallest Western military force could have ended the violence very quickly--that simply by being there, with the will to shoot purple-wigged thugs when necessary, a few thousand U.S. soldiers would have tempered Hutu rage and stopped the mass slaughter. Indeed, Mr. Rusesabagina plays off the Hutus' fear of Western military power by telling one officer that American spy satellites are watching everything and at another point wins help from the same officer by telling him he'll need someone to testify on his behalf at a future war-crimes tribunal.
What might give policy makers pause is not that the West stood by and did nothing while a brutal genocide was under way in a former Belgian colony--a view of what the world looks like when the U.S. doesn't lead and instead leaves it up to the Europeans and the U.N. to act. But rather that Americans who see this film are likely to walk out and say: We should have done something. If American culture internalizes that feeling, American foreign policy will undergo a dramatic shift that will place this nation in a situation similar to the one the British found themselves in a century ago--embroiled in military confrontations in out-of-the-way places around the world. But unlike the British, the U.S. does not have an empire to run.
Of course, the U.S. military has long been the best ally human freedom has ever known. From the First World War and on up through World War II, Korea and, yes, Vietnam and Iraq today, our military has stood in defense of liberty and has often paid a steep price for it. But only rarely has the military might of this nation been used to intervene in a civil conflict for purely humanitarian reasons. Our recent reluctance to get involved in Haiti and Liberia exemplify the traditional U.S. preference for a "realist" foreign policy--using military firepower for humanitarian missions only when it also protects a strategic interest.
American foreign policy has been moving toward purely humanitarian wars for years, most notably with Bill Clinton's involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo. Yet Mr. Clinton was still not willing to put boots on the ground to wage war against genocide. By 2003, however, it became clear that American culture was grappling with the reality that the nation had the ability to step in and save civilian lives and therefore might have some moral obligation to do so. The issue made it to the silver screen that year in Bruce Willis's film "Tears of the Sun," which is a story about a handful of U.S. soldiers who find themselves in the middle of a civil war in Africa and are forced to decide whether to step in to save civilians. (They do.)
The primary force moving America away from "realism" is the war on terror, which spurred President Bush's articulated policy of peace through democracy. The president's critics never seem to tire of claiming that the war in Iraq began over weapons of mass destruction and only later morphed into a war of liberation. This criticism isn't entirely right, and in any case it misses the point. The normal pattern for great struggles is for the battle to be joined before the larger, moral reason for fighting takes center stage. So it was for Abraham Lincoln, who waited until two years into the Civil War before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and forever tying the war and its outcome to the abolition of slavery.
By elevating the war on terror to a struggle over human liberty, President Bush has given us a larger moral reason to continue the fight. And he also is ensuring that we'll find natural allies in the people we are fighting to liberate--the very people who we need to stand against the radical Islamists in their midst. It's probably the only way we can win the war on terror. But it is also a policy that will take on its own momentum. If our peace is best secured through other people's democracy, than why not put boots on the ground the next time Haiti or Liberia needs help? Or in Darfur, Sudan, or even North Korea?
Presently, this question can be deflected with a simple answer--our military is a little busy right now with Iraq and Afghanistan. But there will come a time when it will not be too busy, when the logic of today's rhetoric will be inescapable. At some point in the near future liberating countries and stopping mass graves from being filled will become an end in itself. There will come a time when we are faced with another Rwanda and policymakers will find out that the American people will not again tolerate doing nothing.
Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.
