Why did Bill Clinton refuse to intervene in the Rwanda genocide?

While people were sitting in conference rooms debating over the term "genocide", innocent people were being hacked to pieces with machetes and other primitive weapons. Most of the 800,000 Tutsi's slaughtered were killed by the blade, so would it have really been that difficult to intervene if most of the Hutu militia was killing with machetes?

Clinton publicly apologized for not intervening in "that Rwanda thing". But what was his reasoning?

He not only refused to intervene, he actively sought to allow it to happen.

Here is a good article for you to read.http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200109/po...

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

I don't mean to be scarcastic, but Clinton wanted to make love not war... he was hesitant to get into any military action while in office. The only reason why he sent troops to Bosnia was to deflect the "controversies" as he personal activities became public. He also failed to finish what Bush started in Somalia. So tell me what he and Hillary have done to stop the genocide happening for years in Darfur?

If we want to win friends in the world, stop terrorism, then perhaps we should send food and aid to those who need it most not just to those who have something we want in return.

His reasoning was probably that interventionist foreign policy leading to limmitted quasi-wars did not have a good record in getting presidents re-elected, or setting thier party up for electoral victory. He defeated George Bush in '92, after Bush fought - and won - the first Gulf War, to liberate Kuwait from Iraq. That war went about as well as such a war could, and Bush still couldn't get re-elected having won it.

Clinton pefered to keep his foreign policy more 'hands off' in the military sense. He was probably right to do so - remember how well Somalia went.