The Case Against Susan Rice

For months now, the steady drumbeat of criticism against UN Ambassador Susan Rice has been focused on her bungled handling of the Benghazi attacks. However, as the New York Times reported on Monday, Rice’s failure as a civil servant extends beyond what she said in a Meet the Press interview. Rice, on the shortlist to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, has been accused of preventing UN action against Rwanda, the main bankroller of the M23 rebel group wreaking havoc in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Rice served as the Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in the Clinton administration in the immediate aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. In typically naïve fashion, the administration assumed that the best form of repentance for ignoring a genocide that killed around 800,000 people would be to blindly support the forces that ended the genocide. Those forces, led by now-President Paul Kagame, have been in power for nearly twenty years. Kagame has used the genocide as a pretext to go after opponents of his rule, including human rights activists, lawyers, and free speech advocates. Worse, he has shrewdly calculated that the West would never go after him as a sponsor of genocide, given the credibility he curried in the early ‘90s. Hence his brazen funding of the M23.

Throughout, Kagame has kept his friends in the West, especially among veterans of the Clinton administration, like Rice, who was a paid consultant for Kagame while she was at the private firm Intellibridge during the Bush administration. Luckily for Kagame, Rice has stayed true to Intellibridge’s motto: “We not only deliver on what we say we will, we over deliver.” “Over delivering” in this case means blocking all UN Security Council condemnations of DRC violence that mention Rwanda’s role. The Times reported a story of Rice upbraiding the French UN ambassador for the mere suggestion of shaming Rwanda:

Two months ago, at a meeting with her French and British counterparts at the French Mission to the United Nations, according to a Western diplomat with knowledge of the meeting, Ms. Rice objected strongly to a call by the French envoy, Gerard Araud, for explicitly “naming and shaming” Mr. Kagame and the Rwandan government for its support of M23, and to his proposal to consider sanctions to pressure Rwanda to abandon the rebel group.

“Listen Gerard,” she said, according to the diplomat. “This is the D.R.C. If it weren’t the M23 doing this, it would be some other group.”

The ongoing conflict in the DRC has killed an estimated three million people in the past ten years, an unfathomable number that remains unknown to the vast majority of the world. Susan Rice, in her capacity as UN envoy, has been aiding and abetting that genocide by providing Paul Kagame with American backing on the world stage. To point out the obvious, this behavior should completely disqualify her from becoming Secretary of State. Not that John Kerry doesn’t have skeletons in his own closet, though. So much for President Obama’s pledge to “restore America’s moral standing in the world.”