Amaravati has an article about the Congo, where several million people have died. Predictably, some of the most victimized groups have turned to the U.N. Predictably, the U.N. has studied the situation, deliberated, taken ineffective half-measures, and done essentially nothing.
Someone tell me again why this organization has any moral authority, let alone the quasi-religious totemism brought to it by the Left? The rest of us, who recall the U.N.'s endlessly cynical inaction and even facilitation of murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, and other places, aren't exactly surprised. As James Hudnall notes: "No one seems to get outraged by mass murder unless Americans or Israelis are involved."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Rachel Lucas blogs about Judge Kozinski's dissenting opinion in the American Silveira v. Lockyer decision of a few weeks ago (U.S. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit). Following a reference to the disarming of America's blacks during the slavery years, the Judge's dissent goes on to include this paragraph:
"All too many of the other great tragedies of history - Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few - were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. [See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99.] If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.Since I'm not an American, the whole gun debate is just... from a different culture is the best way to put it. That said, this is an extremely well-written opinion, probably the most persuasive defense of the American Second Amendment I've ever read.My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history...."
At least the U.N. is sending troops to the scene, even if too few. The USofA has done nothing.
And I'd say anyone sitting in the USofA under this Administration should be kind of careful about pointing fingers at people who are ineffectual and incompetent.
but how did mass availability of guns prevent Saddam Hussein from carrying out his pogroms?
Anne, since I'm not sitting in the USA, I guess I have carte blanche. That's French, a language some of us speak up here.
Sending "some troops" but too few to do anything and under rules of engagement that prevent them from being effective even if there were enough, is in fact worse than sending none at all. As we saw at Srebrenica in Bosnia. All that does in endanger the troops and provide a dangerous illusion of security for the locals (but good PR optics elsewhere). It is the essence of uncaring cynicsm. We saw that in Rwanda, too, as Kofi Anan denied requests for reinforcements or timely action.
The USA is busy, and so are the Brits (and in fairness, the Germans who are on station in several places). China is a Security Council member with the world's largest army. Where are they? Where is India, a country with traditional ethnic ties into Africa? Italy is not a poor country, and has a fine army. Belgium actually bears some direct responsibility because of its history in the Congo. France has a Security Council seat. So does Russia. Why is it that none of them seem bothered enough to lift a finger, or criticize half-measures known to be useless even as this tragic crisis played out?
The U.N. in a nutshell: cynical people who pretend to care, even as they ignore or facilitate mass murder.
The USA isn't the only country in the world that has global responsibilities. And if the UN wishes to pretend it has them too, it had better step up and prove that it deserves them.
Aziz, re: the Kurds... that's easy. It forced Hussein to carry out pogroms instead of wholesale genocide. With the Kurds armed, Saddam had to send in full army formations (expensive), show some restraint in urban areas like Mosul and Kirkuk, and resort to chemical warfare in order to reduce the risk to his own troops while carrying out mass-murder.
If the Kurds had been uniformly disarmed, does anyone really doubt that Saddam would have rounded up tens or even hundreds of thousands more of them, and efficiently killed them in an orderly and continuous program - rather than less efficient pogroms? Ba'athist ideology is directly descended from Fascism, and Saddam's record overall is quite clear. I don't doubt it at all.
agreed, Joe - but the simple fact that Saddam could indeed still carry out pogroms suggests that arming the Congolese alone isn't going to be much of a solution. It might even make things worse because there's no way to guarantee that the guns are selectively dispensed to the "right" people.
Arming the pygmies would probably be difficult.
Not sure it would work, either.
First, you'd have to pick small, almost-never jam, low-recoil weapons. Training them would be the biggest hurdle (language? and this ain't no blowgun, folks), though once trained their environment would make them a real threat to those who invaded their territory. But how would one make contact? Arrange that training? Difficult.
Not sure it isn't worth trying, though, given the alternative of waiting for a UN that will do nothing or worse, and an America too preoccupied elsewhere (Iraq, Iran, Korea) to help. It's the sort of immediate thing that could be done cheaply and immediately, using just a few Special Forces teams plus helicopter support, 2-3 medium transport planes, and a small wing of 4-5 jets. The rest of the country would still be a hellhole, but at least the Pygmies would have some protection and we'd begin building a base for future action.
My preferred solution would be country-wide, using about 50,000 troops backed by armored vehicles, portable artillery (mortars and 105s), helicopters, and an air squadron or two, having few rules of engagement and given a command to restore order by any means necessary. Those last clauses and heavy support are what allow the numbers to be that low - it has been done before in Africa, and we're long past the point of half-measures.
But again, the USA has Iraq, Iran and North Korea to worry about. They're fully booked. The UK is as committed as it can be. If anything is going to get done in the Congo, others will have to step up with the tools to do the job - or reveal both their global pretensions and moral authority to be empty.