Cambodia's agony, brought on by America's destabilizing secret bombing and invasions during the Vietnam War, was also fine since it only demonstrated the inhumanity of Communists and the validity of the paranoid "domino theory," it being the intervention of war-weary Vietnam that mercifully ended the "killing fields."

There is no consistency here at all. In one genocide, Communists were being killed. In the other, Communists were doing the killing. Perhaps the State Department took to heart Emerson's line about a "foolish consistency being the hobgoblin of little minds." The same philosophy undoubtedly prevailed in the several instances of America's overturning unfriendly democracies and installing friendly brutal thugs. America only likes democracies that yield acceptable results.

Consistency did show up in the attitude towards Rwanda. After all, that was Africa, and who the hell cares about Africa?

There are many perverse and not-widely-understood aspects to this relationship between foreign affairs and domestic attitudes and politics. One of the most interesting was suggested to me by an off-handed remark in a letter from a reader in the Netherlands: Americans can't even keep peace and order in their own cities; what makes them think they are capable of doing it anywhere else?