GUESTWORDS By Jeremy Wiesen: Have We Been Good, Santa?

Christmas can be a time to evaluate our collective “goodness.”

We get a bad report card because we should have considered protecting the 300,000 Syrians killed by Assad and the 3.5 million refugees still alive — barely. We could have tried harder to put together a coalition for a no-fly zone and safe haven and told how it could be achieved most safely for United States forces.

Senator John McCain pleaded for action three years ago. He knows something about human suffering, international affairs, and military options. This is not the first time that we turned a deaf ear to a huge massacre, even when there was no danger to American troops.

In 1994, the United Nations Security Council voted to send 3,000 peacekeepers to Rwanda to stop an imminent genocide. The U.S. vetoed the troops, who would have kept the simple weapons under lock and key. In the next 100 days, 800,000 people were hacked to death by machetes, except for those who could pay $35 to be shot.

You may have seen this in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” and the documentary “The Last Just Man” shows our U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright raising her arm high in a defiant veto at the U.N. Security Council, presumably knowing it would mean one of the worst 100 days in the history of the world.

At the same time, 100,000 people were being massacred in a genocide in Bosnia. Troops were not sent in until 1995, even though Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who dedicates his life to “never again,” told me that President Clinton two years earlier had assured him that troops were being deployed soon. We suffered hardly a casualty after we arrived.

This kind of devaluation of life was also present in our Desert Storm fight against Iraq in 1991. We gave a ticker tape parade to our returning soldiers for a victory that was nothing more than killing 250,000 poor Iraqi troops sent to the front lines by the madman Saddam Hussein. We killed them in a few days with hardly a U.S. casualty.

We mourn profusely the loss of 14 Americans in the San Bernardino shootings but do not feel connected with the hundreds of thousands of lives lost abroad. Leadership from politicians, the press, and the pulpit could change our thinking.

Two years after Rwanda, Clinton promoted Madeleine Albright to secretary of state. Susan E. Rice, who in 1994 was the president’s director for international organizations and peacekeeping at the National Security Council and a protégée of Albright’s, was later promoted to assistant secretary of state for African affairs, completing a tandem of diabolical political rewards.

Rice became U.N. ambassador under Obama and is now his national security adviser. Not surprisingly, ISIS has been underestimated and she has opposed a safe haven and no-fly zone in Syria. U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, one of the greatest opponents of genocide, is apparently silenced by Rice, who outranks her.

This reminds me of George W. Bush listening to Dick Cheney rather than Colin Powell, who was against invading Iraq, and the promotion of Condoleezza Rice to secretary of state after 9/11 occurred on her watch as national security adviser.

Supporters of Sanders and Trump sense that they would give important jobs to the best people, and not failed career politicians with poor insight and values.

The press can be a problem too. Abe Rosenthal, once the powerful editor of The New York Times, used the “Black Hawk down” tragedy in Somalia, in which 18 Marines were brutally murdered and more than 70 injured trying to stop a genocide, to rail against intervention in Bosnia and Rwanda because those countries were not in America’s security interests.

I confronted Rosenthal 10 years later and he admitted to telling Clinton he would turn The Times against him if Clinton went into Bosnia or Rwanda. Abe went on to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which ought to be revoked posthumously.

Normally, we cannot count on our religious institutions to be leaders on issues out of favor with their congregations, of which saving people in the Mideast might well be one. But it is a new day with Pope Francis, who is unparalleled as a spokesman for the oppressed. In 2013 he urged even atheists to join him in bringing peace.

Caring leads to understanding and understanding leads to solutions.

Violence has always evolved out of poverty more than ideology. Karl Marx said on zero calories a day we are all anarchists. There are hundreds of millions of unemployed Muslims. ISIS gives them meals and a purpose, the way they see it.

I wrote in 2007 that America should be exporting entrepreneurship, not dropping bombs. Now the State Department has the Global Entrepreneurship Program, but it is little and late.

America needs to be known for bringing food, shelter, clothing, and economic opportunity. When we drop bombs, as Obama says we have done against ISIS 9,000 times, even though we are trying not to kill innocent people we are at the least destroying the country’s economic infrastructure. A country cannot make long-term friends this way.

When I was in Israel over 50 years ago the people I met said their future would turn on how much Israel’s economic prowess spills over to its neighbors. It did not do so sufficiently and the consequences were predicted back then, in 1963.

When I see children at Halloween having fun trying to see how scary they can be, I think of how disconnected we are from a big part of the world. Half a billion children go to sleep every night actually scared to death because they are starving; they are thirsty and sick without medicines; they fear they will be kidnapped or forced to be a child soldier or teen bride or prostitute, or left an orphan because their father was killed and mother raped and killed. Nothing could be further from the Halloween luxury of a big laugh.

Hopefully, the next U.S. president will inspire a greater concern for the disadvantaged in the U.S., and the world’s neediest too, because “There but for the grace of God go I.”

Jeremy Wiesen, a longtime East Hampton resident, is a retired professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business and is part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.