Sorry Excuse
Bill Clinton has been
roundly denounced for his "apology tour" of Africa. House Majority Whip Rep.
Tom DeLay, R-Texas, implied the president's expressions of regret about slavery
were almost treasonous. "Here's a flower child with gray hairs doing exactly
what he did back in the '60s: He's apologizing for the actions of the United
States. ... It just offends me that the president of the United States is,
directly or indirectly, attacking his own country in a foreign land." Pat
Buchanan wrote that Clinton had "groveled" in Africa. Robert Novak called the
apology for slavery "ridiculous." Others have charged that the president's
contrition regarding the U.S. failure to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was
cheap and hypocritical, since it was a considered decision, not (as he implied)
some kind of oversight, and there is no reason to suppose the United States
will decide differently if it happens again.
Fair
points? Not really. Once again, loathing for Clinton is making it hard for
people to see straight. These objections conflate complaints about this
president's personal shortcomings with the question of how any president should
represent the United States abroad. Ought Clinton have gone to Africa and
simply not mentioned slavery? Should he have noted it but offered no view? Can
any world leader travel to Rwanda in 1998 and not discuss genocide? To do so
would be heartless and insulting. It's hard to believe that even a primitive
such as DeLay thinks the president should play emperor, never explaining or
apologizing for his country's actions. Then again, that was George Bush's
position. "I will never apologize for the United States of America, I don't
care what the facts are," he said during the 1988 campaign, after a U.S.
cruiser had mistakenly shot down an Iranian plane, killing 290 civilians.
It's not just Clinton's sympathetic promiscuity that
accounts for the recent boom in the atonement. Apologies for national failings,
both domestic and foreign, are in fashion not just in the United States but
also in Britain, Japan, and elsewhere. One reason is that honesty has become
less costly since the end of the Cold War. The Soviet Union no longer has an
enormous propaganda apparatus trained against us. Now the nations of the West
can admit wrongdoing without the fear that they are giving ammunition to the
enemies of freedom.
But when
are national apologies sensible? Offered casually or indiscriminately, they can
look like sops to constituencies rather than expressions of genuine regret. No
nation should want to turn into David Brock. I don't think Clinton has reached
the point where saying he's sorry is an empty gesture, but he may be flirting
with it. Two of his apologies in Africa meet the test. A third one doesn't.
The best case for apology is a great and
indisputable national misdeed. Ronald Reagan's apology to World War II-era
Japanese internees falls into this category, as does the Vatican's apology to
victims of the Holocaust. So also do Clinton's comments in Uganda about
slavery. The objections--that Africans, too, dealt in slaves; that slaves came
from West Africa, not Uganda; that American blacks, not Africans deserve the
apology--are nit-picking. Here's what Clinton actually said: "Going back to the
time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of
the slave trade. And we were wrong in that." To say that white Americans
wrongly benefited from the slave trade doesn't imply that white Americans were
exclusively responsible.
On the
other hand, an apology can be justified without being required or even
desirable. Clinton has decided, for a variety of reasons, that a domestic
apology for slavery isn't a good idea. This does not require him to observe a
taboo on the topic abroad.
Somewhat more troubling was Clinton's apology for not
intervening to prevent the Rwandan genocide. Here's what he said:
The international
community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of
responsibility for this tragedy, as well. We did not act quickly enough after
the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe
havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their
rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do
everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of
hope. ... We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize
ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And
where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the
horror.
This
apology seems insincere, because Clinton did not offer any realistic sense of
the obstacles to humanitarian military action involving the United States. At
first Clinton may have wished, at some level, to intervene in Rwanda, Bosnia,
and Haiti. But for practical and political reasons, he determined intervention
was possible only in Haiti, then later in Bosnia. This was after the debacle in
Somalia, remember, and at a time when his popularity was at low ebb. Clinton's
judgment that he was in no position to send troops to Rwanda may not have been
courageous. It may not even have been correct. But like a decision not to risk
saving someone from a burning building, it is not morally culpable.
So why apologize? I would defend Clinton's
apology as a statement of aspiration. He delineates specific actions that he
might plausibly have taken short of sending in the Marines. And there is reason
to think that with more political capital, no re-election looming, and a
heightened sense of horror, he would behave differently.
What a
country should not apologize for is a basically sound foreign policy. And
Clinton unfortunately did that as well--though it drew less attention than his
other comments. In his Uganda speech, before the part about slavery, Clinton
said:
In our
own time, during the Cold War, when we were so concerned about being in
competition with the Soviet Union, very often we dealt with countries in Africa
and in other parts of the world based more on how they stood in the struggle
between the United States and the Soviet Union than how they stood in the
struggle for their own people's aspirations to live up to the fullest of their
God-given abilities.
The president speaks here as if the battle against
communism were an overheated World Cup match, rather than itself a struggle for
democracy and human rights. Even when Realpolitik led the United States
to side with dictators and oppressors, it was in the service of maximizing
democracy and human rights in the world at large--a goal we in fact achieved.
Every Cold War decision to put U.S. interests ahead of "people's aspirations"
in individual countries may not be defensible, but the general policy is one we
needn't apologize for. And by the way, the Cold War did not always define
American policy in Africa. Well before the fall of communism, Congress passed
comprehensive sanctions against the apartheid regime in South Africa. We did
this even though the white South African government was a staunch U.S. ally in
the Cold War, while Nelson Mandela's African National Congress had extensive
Communist and Soviet ties.
As it happens, that subject
came up during Clinton's stop in South Africa, when Mandela publicly refused to
apologize for the ANC's Realpolitik alliances. It is debatable whether
friendships with Libya and Cuba actually serve South Africa's interests today.
But Mandela is right not to apologize for having accepted help from various
malefactors, including the Soviet Union, during the liberation struggle--when
actual support from the United States came very late. Like the U.S. in the Cold
War, the ANC made reasonable choices under circumstances in which moral purity
wasn't an option.
