Remember Rwanda? The history books have not treated kindly America's inaction while more than 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by their Hutu compatriots in the spring of 1994 after a plane crash killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi.Some in the anti-war movement will just call that another cruel necessity,
Now consider a scenario in which the decisions and actions of the United States were the primary reasons for a country's descent into chaos and sectarian violence, yet instead of doing everything possible to avert a humanitarian catastrophe, America chose to walk away. What would the history books say about that?
Should the Democratic leadership in Congress succeed in forcing the hasty withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, we may well find out.
Before Christmas, Robert Taylor argued for troops out of Iraq and his article included the following paragraph: "It will be argued an Anglo-American evacuation from Iraq could not be done overnight. But a strict timetable of June or July next year could be set for the process to end. There is a precedent, although admittedly not one that suggests such a departure would be trouble-free. The exit from India and that country's partition in 1947 cost the lives of millions but it was a cruel necessity. The same can be said for Iraq."