Connoisseurs of tea leaves will note that President Obama, in his statement today on Armenian Remembrance Day, was very careful to avoid use of the word “genocide” in describing the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during the First World War. The killings, he explained, were “one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century,” the Armenians were “brutally massacred” by the Turks and endured “unspeakable suffering” at the hands of the collapsing Ottoman regime. But the identification of the ethnic Christian Armenian population by the Islamic government of Turkey in 1915, and its policy of mass eradication and expulsion, was described by the president with very nearly every available term except the most accurate: “genocide.”

This is of interest for two reasons. First, it constitutes a broken presidential promise. Senator Obama was (correctly) critical of the George W. Bush administration when it, too, deliberately avoided use of the term “genocide”—in violation, as well, of candidate Bush’s pledge in 2000 to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Senator Obama was (also correctly) critical of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when, in 2006, she summarily dismissed the United States ambassador to Armenia for employing the term “genocide” to describe the Armenian Genocide. “I shared with Secretary Rice,” Obama said at the time, “my firmly held conviction that the Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.”