Without steadfast support from France, which armed the genocidal regime and helped train its killers, the slaughter would have been impossible.

A good post on the Guardian:

"Stephen Kinzer

• 
  
• guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 January 2009 19.00 GMT
• Article history

An international tribunal has sentenced the mastermind of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, to life imprisonment after convicting him of "genocide and crimes against humanity and war crimes". The verdict, though, is at best a mixed victory for the cause of global justice.

Bagosora richly deserves his sentence. Rwandans themselves bear the central guilt for their tragedy, and he was among the guiltiest. Shortly before the slaughter began, he announced that he was preparing a "second apocalypse". Tutsi-led rebels were close to overthrowing the regime he helped run, and along with a couple of dozen like-minded comrades, he decided that its best hope was to kill every Tutsi in the country. They almost succeeded, organising the murder of as many as one million people or more in a 100-day period.

As punishment, Bagosora will likely spend the rest of his days in material conditions far better than those enjoyed by 95% of Rwandans. He will be deprived of his freedom, but the world's taxpayers, through the UN, will assure that he has a comfortable cell, three meals a day and the world's finest medical care.

One thing will be missing, though. In the modern age, prisons that hold war criminals, political murderers and other terrorists are populated mostly by brutes like Bagosora – people easily portrayed as thugs from thuggish places. So the newly convicted genocide mastermind will not have the chance to exchange thoughts with his more genteel enablers.

In a just world, Bagosora might have French company in his cell block. Without steadfast support from France, which armed the genocidal regime and helped train its killers, the slaughter would have been impossible. So it seems only fair that a few French aristocrats be held responsible. One candidate would be former foreign minister Alain Juppe, who built a framework within which the slaughter could be carried out by telling the world that it was not genocide but "tribal war" in which opposing groups were equally guilty. There could also be room in the block for others who shielded the Rwandan regime as it killed, among them Edouard Balladur, Dominique de Villepin and Hubert Vedrine.( A GOOD POINT )

No one ever took more delight in these men's company than the lifelong Francophone Boutros Boutros-Ghali, so it would be a shame to leave him off the cellblock. As UN secretary-general in 1994, Boutros-Ghali made sure no security council members ever saw the anguished cables that were pouring into New York from the desperate UN commander in Rwanda, General Romeo Dallaire. Those cables made clear that the killing was no eruption of "tribal war", but the work of Bagosora and a clique of other fanatics who might easily have been intimidated with even a modest show of force.

While the genocide unfolded, Boutros-Ghali was on an extended tour of Europe. To make sure Dallaire's damning cables remained hidden, he relied on his trusted deputy, Kofi Annan, who was then head of UN peacekeeping operations. If there is room for Boutros-Ghali and his French friends on Bagosora's block, there should also be room for Annan.( WOW )

No international gathering these days is complete without Bill Clinton, and by some standards he too could qualify for a cell on Bagosora's block. During the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda, Clinton never even convened a meeting to discuss it because he knew that the facts were so awful that if he confronted them, he would be compelled to act. Later he said he had not known what was happening in Rwanda. General Dallaire called him a liar, and Philippe Galliard, who ran Red Cross operations in Rwanda during the genocide, agreed. "Everybody knew, every day, live, what was happening," he said after Clinton's whopper.( A DISGRACE )

Just as Boutros-Ghali had an ambitious underling who was salivating for the big job, and who knew that demanding action to stop genocide in Rwanda would ruin his chances, so did Clinton. His was Madeleine Albright. As America's ambassador to the UN, she worked tirelessly to assure that the peacekeeping force was kept too small and toothless to stop the killing. Later she helped block a plan to send UN police to disarm the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan genocidaires who had fled to camps in eastern Congo – a piece of work that helped create today's Congolese hell.( DISGRACEFUL )

Justice works slowly, and none more slowly than the international kind. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has spent more than a billion dollars since its creation in 1995, but has completed only 40 cases. All the defendants have been Rwandans, as undoubtedly will be all those convicted in the future. The tribunal's motto is "never again". A better one would from an old Bob Dylan song: The executioner's face is always well hidden."

And this has led to the Congo.

"“You still have a massive paranoia in the marketplace and you’ve got that safety-at-any-cost mentality,”

You can see the following behavior as sensible or over the top. From Bloomberg:

"By Matthew Benjamin and Liz Capo McCormick

Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Bill Clinton was forced to abandon spending initiatives to boost the economy at the start of his presidency when advisers warned him that the borrowing needed to fund the programs would push interest rates higher. President- elect Barack Obama may not have the same problem.

While the total amount of U.S. government debt outstanding rose to $10.7 trillion in November from $9.15 trillion a year earlier, the amount of interest paid in the last two months fell by $10 billion, according to the Treasury Department.

Instead of shunning the U.S., where losses on subprime mortgages in 2007 triggered a global seizure in credit markets that led to the downfall of securities firms Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., investors can’t get enough Treasuries. Even as estimates of Obama’s stimulus package and the budget deficit rise to a record $1 trillion, demand continues to increase as investors flee risky assets around the world and put their cash into U.S. bonds paying, in some cases, nothing in yield just to ensure the return of their principal.

“You still have a massive paranoia in the marketplace and you’ve got that safety-at-any-cost mentality,” said Jay Mueller, who manages about $3 billion of bonds at Wells Fargo Capital Management in Milwaukee. “People are not buying Treasury bills because they think the yields are attractive. They are buying them because they are afraid to put money anywhere else.”

This Fear and Aversion To Risk and the accompanying Flight To Safety are not driven but fundamentals and clear analysis. Could these investments prove sensible? Of course they could, but the Flight To Safety appears overdone.

Why to the US?

"Foreign central banks and other institutions are accumulating Treasuries at the fastest pace since 1988, boosting their holdings 12 percent since September, compared with a 7.7 percent increase last quarter, according to the Federal Reserve.

Purchases accelerated even as the yield on the benchmark two-year Treasury note tumbled to 0.76 percent last week from this year’s peak of 3.11 percent on June 13. Rates on three- month bills turned negative on Dec. 9 for the first time. The same day, the U.S. sold $30 billion of four-week bills at a zero percent rate. Yields on two-, 10- and 30-year Treasuries last week all fell to lowest since the U.S. began regular sales of those securities.

The two-year note yielded 0.73 percent as of 2:32 p.m. in New York, according to BGCantor Market Data, after falling as low as 0.66 percent on Dec. 12.

The drop in yields drove bond prices higher, pushing returns to 12.4 percent on average this year, the best performance since they gained 13.4 percent in 2000, according to New York-based Merrill Lynch & Co.’s U.S. Treasury Master Index. The returns compare with a drop of 41 percent in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and average losses of 15 percent in Merrill Lynch’s broadest corporate bond index."

If you had purchased bonds with higher yields, then you would be doing quite well now, which is why William Gross wishes that he had done so.

“This is not about return and yield and value; investors are functioning out of raw fear,” said Barr Segal, a managing director at Los Angeles-based TCW Group Inc., which oversees $90 billion in fixed-income assets. At the same time, “this is fabulous for the Treasury because they are borrowing at virtually nothing,” he said.

Japan’s bond market suggests that low yields may remain for a sustained period. In an effort to revive sagging growth in the 1990s, the world’s second largest economy ran its national debt to 1.5 times of gross domestic product. Yields on Japanese bonds are near the lowest in three years, with the country’s benchmark 10-year bond paying 1.40 percent, compared with 2.59 percent in the U.S. The national debt in the U.S. is 72 percent of GDP.

“It’s good news,” said James Horney, director of federal fiscal policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. “Even though we’re borrowing larger amounts of money, the total amount we’re going to pay in interest is going to be somewhat lower.”

Why aren't the people who claim that buying Toxic Assets during this crisis and Spending Money On Infrastructure now because wages and other costs are lower, recommending that we borrow freely now for no interest?

"Interest was $92.5 billion from August through November 2007 on the $9.15 trillion in total debt outstanding, resulting in interest expense of 1.01 percent. In the same period a year later, interest was $87.5 billion on $10.66 trillion in total debt, dropping the expense to 0.8 percent.

While the median estimate of 49 economists and strategists is for 10-year Treasury yields to end 2009 at 3.65 percent, that’s still below the average of 6.91 percent paid on the securities since 1962. The security helps determine corporate and consumer borrowing rates.

Obama plans an economic stimulus package that may approach $1 trillion, in addition to a middle-class tax cut and universal health care, which may add $4 trillion or more to the national debt over 10 years, according to the Tax Policy Center in Washington and health-care economists."

So we will borrow for less?

"The U.S. already posted a record $401.6 billion budget shortfall for the first two months of fiscal 2009, which began Oct. 1, according to a Treasury report last week. The largest postwar budget deficit by the U.S. was $412.7 billion in 2004.

“The role of the deepening economic slump in this deterioration coupled with the escalating size of the likely fiscal stimulus puts the deficit on course to exceed $1 trillion,” Edward McKelvey, a senior economist in New York at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., wrote in a Dec. 8 report to clients. “This implies upside risk to our $2 trillion figure for Treasury supply.”

Clinton’s proposals to spur the economy early in his administration in 1993 were stymied by concern how bond investors would react, according to James Carville, a Clinton consultant during the 1992 presidential campaign.

“Early in the Clinton days, the hallmark of policy was if you did this, how would it affect the bond market,” Carville said in an interview last year. “Every time I would talk to someone they would say ‘you can’t do that, it will freak the bond market out.’ I said ‘goddamn, whoever the bond market is, these bastards are powerful.’”

The potential for massive deficits has done nothing to damp demand for government debt as the U.S. prepares to spend $8.5 trillion to bailout financial institutions, homeowners and the economy. The biggest deficit as a percentage of the economy was 6 percent in 1983. A trillion-dollar 2009 gap would top that.

To prevent yields from rising, Fed policy makers indicated that the central bank may buy Treasuries. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke suggested in a Dec. 1 speech that he would consider such a measure, saying one option is to buy “longer-term Treasury or agency securities on the open market in substantial quantities.”

“If there is a whiff of anything getting worse, the Fed can just go downstairs and start that printing press,” said Kevin Gaynor, head of economics and interest-rate strategy at Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc in London. “They can easily stop targeting the federal funds rate and start targeting a two- or five-year Treasury yield.”

Policy makers may also cut interest rates again, which may keep bond yields low. The Federal Open Market Committee will reduce its target rate for overnight loans between banks by a half-percentage point, to a record 0.50 percent, when it meets Dec. 15-16, according to the majority of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

The U.S. economy has been in a recession for a year, the National Bureau of Economic Research declared on Dec 1. The economy will continue to contract through June, with unemployment rising above 8 percent the end of 2009, from 6.7 percent last month and this year’s low of 4.8 percent in February, according to Bloomberg surveys of economists. That would make the current slump the longest since the Great Depression.

“In some ways it’s ironic,” said Meg Browne, senior currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “The U.S. turned down first and the crisis appeared first in the U.S., yet people continue to flock to the U.S. government debt market because it’s the biggest and deepest market in the world and still has a low risk.”

The U.S. will eventually have to commit to balanced budgets, said Alice Rivlin, former Fed vice chairman and founding director of the Congressional Budget office.

“We can’t press our luck,” said Rivlin, now a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Eventually, we’ve got to show the world that we are fiscally responsible.”

This post went far and wide, then wider, but the points about printing money and showing that eventually we're going to handle this debt and deficit are correct points to be made.

"Americans, to be sure, are always reluctant to undertake ambitious government initiatives. "

John Judis with a post that I sort of disagree with, via Clive Crook:

"If Obama and the Democrats in Congress act boldly, they can not only arrest the downturn, but also lay the basis for an enduring majority. As was the case with Franklin Roosevelt, many of the measures necessary to combat the recession--such as spending money on physical and electronic infrastructure, adopting national health insurance--will also help ensure a Democratic majority. The rural South remained Democrat for generations because of Roosevelt's rural electrification program; a similar program for bringing broadband to the hinterland could lead these voters back to the Democratic Party. And national health insurance could play the same role in Democrats' future prospects that Social Security played in the perpetuation of the New Deal majority.

Americans, to be sure, are always reluctant to undertake ambitious government initiatives. This is, as historian Louis Hartz once demonstrated, a country founded on Lockean liberalism. But as Roosevelt discovered when he was elected, a national crisis creates a popular willingness to entertain dramatic initiatives. Obama and the Democrats will also not face the same formidable adversaries that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton had to face. The Republican Party will be divided and demoralized after this defeat. Just as the Great Depression took Prohibition and the other great social issues of the 1920s off the popular agenda, this downturn has set aside the culture war of the last decades. It wasn't a factor in the presidential election. And the business lobbies that blocked national health insurance in 1994 will incur the public's wrath if they once again try to buy Congress.

If, on the other hand, Obama and the Democrats take the advice of official Washington and go slow--adopting incremental reforms, appeasing adversaries that have lost their clout--they could end up prolonging the downturn and discrediting themselves. What could have been a hard realignment could become not merely a soft realignment, but perhaps even an abortive one. That's not the kind of change that America needs or wants--and, hopefully, Obama and the Democrats understand that."

Here's my problem, where he's specific, I happen to agree with him:

1) Infrastructure spending in the stimulus

2) National health

Why I support 2 is a long story which I've already talked about, but not here. 1 I've talked about a number of times lately.

However, the rest of the post I disagree with. Liberal programs would not work, and, hence, would not end up being popular in terms of economics. Of course, if they were enacted and worked, I wouldn't worry about it, because their working would decide the issue.

I'm not too worried, because it wasn't Judis who was elected.