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33 Which returns us to Bosnia yet again. Power does an excellent job of limning the reluctance of the George H. W. Bush administration to intervene. As then—Secretary of State James Baker famously put it, “We don’t have a dog in this fight.” Instead, to quell charges of its heartlessness, the White House sent American troops to Somalia in a humanitarian venture—a disastrous decision that got America bogged down in a bloody civil war. Next, the Clinton administration came under fire for doing the same sort of hand-wringing over Bosnia as its realist predecessor—surely the Left could be counted on for compassion? Yet then it remained reticent about Rwanda, allowing the Hutus to conduct mass killings of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis. Power’s verdict is withering: The real reason the United States did not do what it could and should have done to stop genocide was not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will. Simply put, American leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it. Power hopes to once and for all turn the tide against American lassitude, against the Democratic slogan propounded by presidential hopeful George McGovern in the 1972 campaign—“Come Home, America.” Liberals were then opposed to Ronald Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan contras, even though he portrayed that partly as a humanitarian venture, pointing to the human-rights abuses perpetrated by the Sandinistas. Reagan, for all the bellicosity, was loath to send American troops into combat, withdrawing them from Lebanon after the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in 1983. What Power overlooks, or minimizes, is the political context of a country in which the term “no more Vietnams” carried, and continues to carry, great political weight. It is these old thought patterns that HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_030563