A DECENT COMPROMISE (II)

American Conservative Magazine
6/a-decent-compromise-ii/
April 27 2009

Alex Massie and Michael Crowley are less impressed with Obama’s
statement on the Armenian genocide than I was. Ben Smith records
the official lobby reactions, which I think are mistaken on both
sides. Contrary to the Turkish Coalition’s awful statement, Obama did
not "defer" to historians (by which they mean embrace whitewashing
of the record), but he made quite clear that he regarded it as one
of the great atrocities of the last century and used an Armenian
phrase, Meds Yeghern, to describe it that conveys the message that
these were criminal acts. Not unfortunate incidents or unavoidable
wartime excesses, as the hacks and paid-off spokesmen would have it,
but crimes and atrocities. That implies willful mass murder directed
against an entire people, which in the end is quite close to what
people understand when someone refers to genocide. In my modern Eastern
Armenian dictionary, yeghern means "slaughter, carnage, genocide"
or a "crime" or "evil deed," and the word yeghern has been and can
be used in the context of referring to the genocide.

The one thing lacking from the statement, which we know is lacking
not for any good historical reason but obviously because of sheer
politicking and interest group lobbying, is the word itself and the
attribution of responsibility to the elements of the Ottoman government
that organized and carried out the genocide. The statement is therefore
incomplete, and it does fall short of what Obama promised he would do,
but there is little cause for the pro-Turkish side to be particularly
pleased about the result. It is understandable that advocates of
recognition are disappointed, but one need only compare statements
of the last two Presidents to appreciate how much of an improvement
this statement is over what we have been offered before. In his last
statement in 2000, the same year he scuppered a House resolution
acknowledging the genocide, Clinton referred to the genocide as a
"great tragedy," which is rather less strong than referring to it
as a great atrocity. Bush’s 2001 statement was relatively stronger,
inasmuch as he described it as "forced exile and annihilation,"
but did not go so far as to call it an atrocity, and by 2008 the
word annihilation had dropped out all together to be replaced by
"mass killings." By comparison, Obama’s statement is a significant
improvement, especially when he says:

I have consistently stated my own view of what occurred in 1915,
and my view of that history has not changed. My interest remains the
achievement of a full, frank and just acknowledgment of the facts.

In every way short of using the word, he is saying that it was a
genocide, and I think he reasonably refrains from using the word,
which might badly damaged U.S.-Turkish and Turkish-Armenian relations*,
while all but conveying the same meaning.

* It is worth noting that Reagan publicly referred to "the genocide
of the Armenians" almost thirty years ago, and somehow our alliance
with Turkey endured. I am still inclined to think that waiting
until relations are somewhat better is the wiser thing to do, but
a President has already acknowledged the truth and our relationship
with Turkey survived intact because of shared interests. My guess is
that the Turkish Coalition’s boast that "his administration will not
sacrifice long-term strategic allies for short-term political gains"
will be thrown back in their faces in the event it becomes clear that
neither Washington nor Ankara is willing to end our long-term strategic
alliance over this question. Indeed, my guess is that over the next few
years we will find out that Ankara has been engaged in an extraordinary
bluff that multiple administrations have never had the courage to call.