In an exhaustive piece in the New York Times magazine on his military policy thinking, McCain said he doubted the US could have intervened in Rwanda. He said:
And yet I look at Darfur, and I still look at Rwanda, to some degree, and think, How could we have gone in there and stopped that slaughter?"
Well, two chiefs of the UN mission to Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias, have some ideas.
General Romeo Daillaire and Major Brent Beardsley have said in fact that a small number of well-armed troops could have shut down the genocide.
In a PBS documentary, "Ghosts of Rwanda," Beardsley said,
The 450 [UN troops] who remained on the ground saved the lives of 25,000 people directly, then indirectly through providing humanitarian aid, most likely tens of thousands more than that. General Dallaire stated quite frequently that if 5,500 troops could have come in, we could have arrested it. Well, if you do the mathematics, we could have saved over a half million people. If the troops had stayed on the ground, if they came in on the evacuation or more troops had come in, we could have stopped it.
Speaking of US marines and other foreign fighters stationed in and around Rwanda, he said,
There's this myth that has come out of Rwanda that it was impossible to intervene and stop this genocide. The facts go in the face of it. Within three days, there was 2,000 troops on the ground, and that could have been the start of a bigger operation and bring in even more. They had a decisive impact from the moment they hit the ground. If they'd only have stayed, I still believe that we could have prevented what happened, and I'll take that to my grave.
McCain perhaps was saying that the US could do little to calm the ethnic tensions that led to the massacres. But one would hope a military man like the Arizona senator might be capable of thinking creatively about how to use military resources to staunch genocide.
