Mystical Politics has a slew of good articles covering Sudan and the ongoing conflict in Darfur, where it would appear that black people are being ethnically cleansed from the region by their fellow Muslims.
Mystical Politics has a slew of good articles covering Sudan and the ongoing conflict in Darfur, where it would appear that black people are being ethnically cleansed from the region by their fellow Muslims.
Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:
*This* puts text in bold.
_This_ puts text in italics.
bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.
To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.
Has the policy changed? I hope Colin Powell's forays are an indication that this is so.
How are USG power interests served by intervention in the Sudan? How many votes will an intervention in Sudan win in November? Is the US population filled with hysteria over the imminent threat of the Sudanese menace?
Right.
Sorry, but if you want something done about atrocities in an area lacking in geostrategic importance and critical natural resources, you need a different tool than the USG.
Wrong-o, TJ.
Sudan has oil, terrorists, and genocide. If there is a finding of genocide, the UN is pretty much obligated to go in. And that means the US.
Actually, if the UN is obliged to go in, it does not mean the US. As Armed Liberal has pointed out here before, the soldiers of the US Army are not the UN's janissaries.
If the UN wishes to maske its pretentions to relevance a reality, there are millions of soliders in other member countries all around the world. Let them step up and show that the term "international community" actually has some semblance of moral weight. It would be an important and very necessary demonstration.
There is a strong case intervention in Sudan, but the UN's record in genocide situations (Rwanda, Srebrenica) is consistently horrible to the point that it borders on complicity. I would support an intervention that is NOT under UN command, as an effective response. Though there is a real question of troop availability on the part of the USA and British.
Or, I would be pleased to see a UN operation in which American (and Canadian) troops did NOT participate. This would remove the risk of our soldiers' complicity in another genocide, and provide a much-needed test of the proposition that the UN has the potential to be a serious force for stability and human rights in the world.
But the UN arrogantly posturing and playing back seat driver, treating the USA as its personal stock of slave soldiers and imposing ridiculous restrictions that both endanger American troops and give the Janjaweed freedom to operate? No thank you.
OT: the new template and comment links are a great improvement. Thanks, Joe! Is registration far behind?
If wishes were fishes, we'd all have a fry ... the bottom line is that the US is pretty much the only country in the world with a moralistic foreign policy.
That said, there are plenty of UN operations with US troops. The Golan Heights, for instance. The problem, it seems to me, is that the UN is neither structured nor equipped to move quickly in anywhere and defuse tensions. And, of course, their rules of engagement need to change. But I don't think these things will happen before we have massive starvation in Darfur. And furthermore, there are still some non-military options available. Bashir is a bastard, but he's a bastard who has shown that he will change his behavior when pressured.
UN troop atrocities, an interesting story. Told in as many sites as UN troops are posted. But never told by the international media, that might be embarassing.
If I were in a third world country under attack, such as Darfur, I would demand either NATO troops, US/UK troops, or no troops at all--just give me the weapons and let me fight them myself.