The blood-stained truth behind Clinton's fine words in Blackpool

Bill Clinton and John Major had more in common than either of them knew. If their past adventures expose a certain commonality (as distinct from commonness), their treatment this past week could hardly have been more different. One ex-leader is hailed as a hero at the Labour Party conference. The other is hounded by the media in Dallas. But this column isn't about sex. No, this is about power and the moral failure of high office.

I had to struggle with some unpleasant memories when I watched Clinton launch into his polemic on foreign affairs. In case you missed it amid the swoons and sighs, President Bill spoke as a great internationalist, a messiah for the philosophy of one-world humanitarianism. All that was missing was Michael Jackson and a chorus of angels crooning: "We are the world. We are the people."

The sad thing wasn't that nobody stood up to contradict. You don't do that kind of thing to visiting superstars. What shocked me was how many otherwise clever and acerbic newspaper journalists lapped it all up. Some mesmerise with the passionate politics of hatred, others wash your brain with tenderness and windy rhetoric. The result in each case is the same. People don't think, and they certainly don't remember.

I wonder if a single individual in that hall or in the press gallery remembered how President Bill Clinton and his administration behaved when he had a chance to put those fine words into practice? Did the word Rwanda get muttered anywhere? The African catastrophe was the most telling example of how Bill Clinton acted when he had a chance to put his principles into action. The 100-day apocalypse in Rwanda confronted the US President with the biggest genocide since the Second World War. Within days it was apparent that tens of thousands were being butchered. Within a month America knew the numbers were running into hundreds of thousands.

I remember standing in the UN compound in the Rwandan capital, Kigali. Mortars were flying back and forth. A few days earlier, a round had hit the peacekeepers' building, another had killed a UN captain as he tried to negotiate the release of trapped civilians. A few weeks previously, the UN force had been scaled down from several thousand to several hundred; this with the active encouragement of the US and approved by President Clinton. The remaining soldiers from Ghana and Bangladesh and Tunisia were led by one of the bravest military men in history, General Romeo Dallaire, a Canadian who'd been left to do his best with the tiny force and a few antiquated armoured personnel carriers. I was talking to a Nigerian UN officer about the possibility of reinforcements coming. It wasn't going to happen, he said. The UN force couldn't even get some extra armoured vehicles to allow it to patrol more extensively. He then said something which – even in the midst of a charnel house like Kigali – shocked me to the core.

"The vehicles are ready, man, but the Americans are arguing over the rental terms." There were questions about who would pay for what and when. So the vital vehicles didn't make it to Rwanda until July as the genocide was ending. The Clinton administration did more than haggle over terms. Even when it was clear as daylight that a genocide was under way the US State Department consistently refused to use the G word. In one unforgettable exchange a spokeswoman said "acts of genocide" had occurred. She was then asked by an exasperated reporter how many "acts of genocide" it took to make a genocide.

This was the response: "That's just not a question I'm in a position to answer." Which was true, since the man who could have given the answer, William Jefferson Clinton, had decided that Rwanda was a lot more trouble than it was worth. Had the US accepted that the attempt to exterminate the Tutsi was genocide then a legal obligation to intervene would have swung into force. That was the 1948 Genocide Convention framed in the wake of the Holocaust to ensure that never again meant never again. So rather than step in to save a people from extinction the Clinton administration lied. It was the lie of obfuscators and dissemblers, but a lie all the same.

A year earlier a badly frightened Clinton had pulled US troops out of Somalia after a brutal mauling at the hands of Somalian warlords. The swiftness of the withdrawal from Somalia had confirmed the Pentagon view that Clinton was a dubious bet in a tight spot. This was a president who consulted opinion polls at every turn and who was cowed by the military brass. I have no doubt that had the polls shown a majority in favour of stopping genocide in Rwanda then Bill would have packed the troops off to Central Africa.

Yet the fact that there was no public support had everything to do with the fact that America's political élite, with Clinton at the top of the pyramid, had made no public running on the issue. A small group of senators did hand-deliver a letter to the White House demanding action, and they waited weeks for Clinton to respond. When he did, Clinton merely said he had "spoken out against the killings" and called for a "full investigation of the atrocities". The White House did eventually act, but only when the slaughter had finished. It sent aircraft, food aid and Tipper Gore.

So when I heard Bill Clinton tell the Labour party conference that he'd listened to the widows of genocide in Rwanda I smiled to myself. What Bill didn't say was that his administration had blocked international action to stop the slaughter.

For the detail of this terrible period I recommend you read Linda Melvern's investigation, A People Betrayed; the Role of the West in Rwanda's Genocide (Zed Books). Even for somebody who was in Rwanda during the genocide and has followed the politics of the situation closely since then, I was taken aback by her revelations. Melvern's account of how the US led the West in its abandonment of Rwanda is a document of tragic importance. Doubtless some will feel that mine is the voice of the churl and the moral prig, holding Clinton to impossibly high standards. You could say he had a lot else on his mind in those days. Bosnia was still going on (and he was still doing as little as he could about it), there was also the problem of his private life and there was re-election to think of. In the circumstances, some might argue that Bill Clinton deserves to be forgiven for his tardiness about genocide.

Forgiveness isn't my business or yours. It is in the gift of those who suffered. In fairness, Clinton went to Rwanda and made a sort of apology, and he can talk about Rwanda now with the dripping empathy you either love or loath. He is a complicated, brilliant and tragic figure. The tragedy is that, deep inside, Clinton knows the truth of how he handled things, but he can bury that reality and present himself as a man who can feel the pain of those who lost their families. I don't doubt that when he looks into their eyes he really feels pain. But as he must know himself, it is a little too late.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent