"National Review" Review of "Hotel Rwanda"

Gabe recommends the National Review's review of Hotel Rwanda:

Hibbs continues in my mind to review films rather well. I've always liked his thoughtfulness.

Hibbs makes a big mistake, though: a mistake that has the effect of letting conservatives off the hook. It wasn't a State Department spokeswoman whose taped statements were repeated exactly as stated, but rather the well-publicized words of the White House Press Secretary, Dee Dee Myers. Thus, the irony that Hibbs notes (the magazine cover showing Bill Clinton as 'Man of the Year') is even more pointed than he realizes.

Myers' evasive statements on genocide earned her well-deserved contempt. But the real problem wasn't just hers, or the State Department's, but rather Bill Clinton's, and America's conservatives'. The highest levels of the U.S. government averted their eyes, even as everyone else watched the unfolding horror. After Somalia, there was no consensus for an African military adventure, no matter how urgent the need. Republicans had no interest in such a thing, certainly, and they were lying in wait to shoot down any such effort. Fearing Republicans, the coward Clinton skipped past Rwanda, but he slowly developed some backbone: he eventually helped freeze the Bosnian crisis in place (the 1995 Dayton agreement), and finally budged on providing military assistance to Kosovo (1999), but only because he had been cornered by his own promises to do so. Clinton was such a coward in great measure because he was responding to the manifest distaste among American conservatives to doing anything effective about genocide.

Hibbs lets conservatives off way, way too easily - their crimes of omission, their isolationism, their small-mindedness. Instead, Hibbs aims at the hapless State Department. Such brave scapegoating!