It's a very important and great question.
I think everybody in this room and certainly many around the world wish we could have prevented the Rwanda genocide. The great tragedy is that while the genocide was going, the United Nations and the United States did so little. I think it was the greatest failing of the United States administration during that period of time. One of the reasons the International Criminal Code was created was that it has a mandate not only to prosecute genocidal crimes but to seek to prevent them. After all, Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that all law is preventive. Its goal is to prevent horrible crimes from occurring.
One of the great challenges--and I've been writing for 40 years about this issue--is when it's appropriate to engage in preventive actions. I wrote a book called Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways, which deals with many of these issues. This is a clear case. This is an easy case, just as the case would have been easy against Adolf Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s. Ahmadinejad could not be clearer about what his intentions and goals are. Rafsanjani could not be clearer in his calculation about how many deaths it would take to destroy the Jewish people and that it would be worth it. There are going to be close cases. There are going to be difficult cases. This is not a close case. This is a case where Ahmadinejad is essentially challenging the free world, the civilized world, to respond. He's not hiding his views. He is stating them very directly.
I was in the room when Ahmadinejad made his notorious speech at the United Nations a week or two ago. For me the most disturbing thing was not the speech itself, but the raucous, enthusiastic applause that his speech got from so many representatives of nations around the world. I walked out with the delegations that walked out in protest. As I was walking out, I was watching these representatives of these nations, and I can tell you, it was not polite applause. I've seen polite applause at UN meetings. This was enthusiastic, raucous applause as if to say in the most uncertain terms, we agree with you. That's why this is such a grave danger and why the world not only has the right but the obligation to step in and do whatever it can to prevent it.
It won't be easy. It won't be easy to make a case. It's always harder to make a case in anticipation of genocide or in anticipation of a terrorist attack. That's why we have conspiracy laws and attempt laws and other such laws. But it is possible. If you have the will to do it, it is possible to do it and stop this genocide before it occurs.