Lessons from Rwanda II: A half-hearted commitment gives a half-baked outcome

Too often we hear the cry that "Something must be done", but all too often what we do is more about making ourselves feel better than allieviating the problem. We want to feel that we've done out bit, but we lack the necessary committment to do it properly. We do a half-harted job, and when the chips are down, we run away.

Thus, while the UN were planning their mission to stabalise Rwanda and uphold the peace, the member states were not really committed to the task.

'...the hard-liners I had met on my reconnaissance of Rwanda had attended the same schools that we do in the West; they read the same books; they watched the same news; and they had already concluded that... the West did not have the will, as it had already demonstrated in Bosnia, Croatia and Somalia, to police the world, to expend the resources or to take the necessary casualties. They had calcultated that the West would deploy a token force and when threatened would duck or run. They knew us better than we knew ourselves.' (Shake hands with the Devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda, Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, p79)