No Fond Farewells for the Undertaker

Was ever a secretary of state so kindly treated as Warren Christopher? Compared to the savaging most of his predecessors at Foggy Bottom endured, Christopher has led a charmed life. There were, it’s true, jokes from time to time during his tenure that he was dead and that his formal duties were being carried out by a sort of spectral oblong blur, but in his final days, as he prepares to head back into the private sector, the fiercest reproofs Christopher has to endure are usually to the effect that on his watch American foreign policy became minimalist both in concept and execution.

In fact, U.S. diplomacy these past four years has been malignly active and Christopher bears grave responsibility, but somehow--perhaps it’s his well-bred undertaker’s air--when the accounts are tallied, Christopher’s name is invariably forgotten. There’s nothing new here in this talent for invisibility. Everyone remembers the excesses of the FBI in Hoover’s final years and the lawless vendettas of the bureau under the Cointelpro program against anti-war resisters, Black Panthers and Native Americans. In his book “FBI,” Sanford Ungar tells how Christopher--deputy attorney general in the twilight of LBJ’s presidency--struck an agreement with the head of U.S. Army intelligence to persecute antiwar protesters, using the Cointelpro program. As the FBI stepped up its illegal operations, the courtly Christopher was enthusiastically aboard.

In Christopher’s years as secretary of state, certainly the most shameful episode concerned the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Rhetorically, the Clinton administration professed its outrage at the terrible killings and the president made an urgent plea for a cease-fire and for the leaders of Rwanda “to recognize their common bond of humanity.” Substantively, the call for a cease-fire meant that the U.S. would not endorse intervention to stop the killing. Indeed, Christopher’s own State Department dickered endlessly over conditions attached to the dispatch of U.N. troops, even though no U.S. soldiers and only a modest amount of U.S. taxpayers’ money were involved.

Even worse was U.S. refusal to countenance the use of the word “genocide” to describe the systematic slaughter of Tutsis. Christopher issued orders that no U.S. official should use this word. The reason was simple enough. To admit that genocide was underway in Rwanda would have obliged the United States to comply with the provisions of the 1948 Genocide Convention and punish those responsible.

Thus officials such as the U.S. ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, were instructed to say, “Acts of genocide may have been committed.” Christopher disingenuously remarked that “If there is any particular magic in calling it genocide, I have no hesitancy in saying that.” As a lawyer, he must have known perfectly well that it was not a matter of magic but of international legal obligation. Not only did the U.S. government refuse to invoke the Genocide Convention, it also tried to void it of operational content.

This was the most disgraceful passage of U.S. diplomacy during Christopher’s tenure, but there are plenty of others. On his watch, the United States appeased China and Indonesia and made overtures toward Afghanistan’s Taliban fanatics, in whose formation and recruitment in Pakistan the U.S. was deeply involved. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu owes a considerable debt of gratitude to Christopher for Likud’s electoral victory, which is proving so fatal to the Oslo accords. Christopher’s futile forays to Syria fatally alienated settlers in the Golan normally loyal to Labor and gave Shimon Peres his margin of defeat. And let us not forget Christopher’s secret diplomacy with Tehran and the arms shuttle from Iran to Croatia and Bosnia that he sanctioned.

Intellectually, Christopher seems to have been chiefly stimulated by the Malthusian ravings of Robert Kaplan, whose prophecies about “eco-wars” between the haves and have-nots caused a stir when they first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Christopher’s touted foreign policy speech at Stanford last April was a ridiculous rewrite of Kaplan, in which demographic hysteria commingled with Realpolitik about managing the environmental future of the Third World.

So let us bid the man adieu without regret. It cannot be said in his defense that he was merely following the orders of a commander in chief obsessed with the management of foreign policy. Hardly that. History should not treat Christopher kindly, nor the U.S. policies that he supervised.