Ryan's blog

I read one of Ryan's entries in which he talks about a possible research projecting investigating US non-intervention politics during the war. The topic sounds very interesting, and a good base for a research paper. The politics are so complicated; the leaders appear untrustworthy and slippery - it would be a fascinating paper.

From peeking at later entries, it seems like Ryan altered his topic to focus on those in the US who advocated intervention; how they came to believe that the US should intervene; what actions they took to influence those in power; and what impact they had. This topic is less interesting to me. Everyone we have read about has been pro-intervention and yet the nation kept up the embargo and didn't aid the Republic. For some reason, the pleas of the interventionalists to the government went unheeded, even calls for action from prominent figures such as Langston Hughes, Albert Einstein, and Hemingway. Although the situations are vastly different, one recent political dilemma reminds me of Roosevelt's: President Clinton's decision to stay out of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Speaking in Kigali four years later, he expressed regret and basically told the Rwandans that he didn't understand the situation at the time - "All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror." (The Nation) The facts suggest that Clinton knew full well the depth of the terror going on in Rwanda, but still failed to intervene. The Washington editor of The Nation thinks that the 1992-93 intervention in Somalia in which the US initially went in to combat a hunger epidemic and were drawn into battles among feuding warlords in which US soldiers died may have made Clinton hesitate from entering another African crisis.