President Clinton managed a trifecta of shamelessness last week in the first half of his Africa trip. He apologized for America's having coddled anti-Communist dictators in Africa during the Cold War. Yet the goal of preserving freedom against the depredations of Moscow and its Cuban mercenaries was worth lots of unpleasant alliances. The Clinton administration, in contrast, coddles dictators merely to appease campaign contributors.
The president also apologized, in so many words, for the slave trade. Pace numerous liberal commentators, Africa is among the least appropriate settings for such contrition, since Africans were as much participants in, as victims of, the slave trade. If the descendants of the slave-owners owe an apology, a morally serious president as opposed to the self-absorbed and preening one we have, would deliver that apology to the descendants of the slaves themselves, on American soil, and not to the descendants of those who captured and sold those slaves in the first place.
Finally, there was the stunningly inappropriate speech in Rwanda, in which President Clinton said of the 1994 genocide of 600,000 Tutsis: "The international community, together with nations in Africa, must bear its share of responsibility for this tragedy." The Clinton administration had full knowledge of the genocide as it was being carried out and thwarted efforts to head it off. Clinton's speech was a blasphemy, as Michael Kelly aptly called it in his National Journal column last week: "a lie to the survivors of genocide about one's complicity in that genocide."