As Americans, we love a good moral excuse. Our national leaders play to our demands for righteousness by expressing appropriate levels of moral indignation at Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait (regardless of our support of his regime during Iraq’s war with Iran) or in our ultimate ideological crusade against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

We have even taken up the admonition of the Holocaust as a national mantra. “Never again” reminds us that we should pay a high price for freedom, even if it is not our own.

We have come to expect high moral rationale for any of our foreign policy dealings and dismiss or even ignore the more tangible material interests at stake when we engage in a diplomatic or military involvement abroad.

This veneer of morality under which we operate while making our public foreign policy statements does not reflect the pragmatic or self-serving reasons we are compelled to get involved in tiny countries that most Americans can’t locate on a map.

As long as enough rhetoric of justice and democracy is produced by Washington, we look past the real economic motivations for our political moves abroad.

Last month, documents declassified in Washington illustrated beyond doubt that the moral posturing we consider synonymous with framing foreign policy is dead. The National Security Archive, an organization part of Georgetown University, obtained and analyzed thousands of documents generated in 1994 during the bloody genocides in Rwanda, a tiny republic in central Africa.

The Rwanda genocide was sparked after then-president of the republic, Habyarimana, was killed when his jet was shot down, decimating the balance of power in the former Belgian colony. Almost immediately the Rwandan army, buttressed by ethic Hutus extremists, began the most intense, bloody slaughter of humanity ever perpetrated.

Using information broadcast over Radio Milles Collines, the killers were able to pinpoint Tutsi victims thanks to the addresses, license plate numbers and names sent over the airwaves.

Hutu and Tutsi groups in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi have a long intertwined history of conflict. Both groups speak the same language, but have alternated positions of prestige in nation. Separated primarily by economic and social conditions, the constant conflict between the two groups reached a new fervor after Belgium pulled out of central Africa in the 1960s.

Most American foreign policy makers considered ethnic violence the norm in Africa, a continent they had no economic or political interests in, especially south of the Sahara.

State Department officials spoke over the telephone with Rwandan generals. Our leaders knew of the genocide, where an entire people was moved to take up their garden implements and crude weapons and attack non-combatant women and children in church sanctuaries.

The declassified documents show that not only were officials aware of the killings, but automatically ruled out any intervention or United Nations support to stop the madness in the green hills of Rwanda.

Additionally, when a few unarmed Belgian peacekeepers were killed in the early days of the genocide, the U.S. and Belgium were anxious to cover one another in a pull-out from Rwanda, citing that seven Western lives were worth the eventual loss of approximately 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus who refused to cooperate with the killings.

Boutros-Boutros Ghali, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, plead with the West to support intervention in his home continent of Africa. After the genocide, he claimed that with less than 1,000 U.N. troops, the killings could have been prevented. However, the U.S. State Department refused to term the event as a genocide, because if they defined it as such they would have been legally compelled to act against it.

While the United States was busy pulling out its U.N. troops and its diplomatic corps and engaging in a semantic foxtrot, the killings in Rwanda continued.

The Pentagon would not even support a mission to disable Radio Milles Collines, thus halting the mode of Hutu organization.

Our embarrassing unwillingness to offer any token support to Rwanda cost the world hundreds of thousands of lives.

As the newly declassified information shows, “never again” has not been adopted by our government when we have a compelling moral reason to act, leadership cannot justify it for want of a material excuse.

Rachel Faber Machacha is a graduate student in international development studies from Emmetsburg.