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.