I don't want to say I told ya so, but the timing of this seems surreal:
From Reuters:
April 23 - Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden urged his followers to prepare for a long war against Western would-be occupiers in Sudan's Darfur region, according to an audiotape attributed to him and aired on Sunday.
and a quote from the text presumed to be Bin laden:
using some differences between some tribesmen, and turned them into a blind war between them that destroys all in preparation to send crusader troops to occupy the region and steal its oil under the guise of preserving security there."
The best part about this argument is that American college kids (and Geggy) will soon be saying the same thing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mburbank
I am not calling for an immediate withdrawl from Iraq and transfer of those troops to the border of chad. I am calling for a drastic rethinking of our foreign policy. I think we as a nation should be talking and debating what we are doing. When the subject of Darfur comes up politically, most of our representatives are deaf.
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I don't think this is entirely true. What would you like for them to do, aside from voting on a resolution to invade Sudan? Some representatives, particularly Republican Senator Brownback, have been
very active in trying to mobilize a response to Darfur.
The UN has unfortunately been equally slow to resond to this. Whether or not we were in Iraq, it would be risky, irresponsible, and potentially galvanizing (for radical muslims) if we went alone into Sudan. I don't think Iraq/Sudan is a prisoners dilemma. We could easily stop the janjaweed. We could easily keep them out of Chad, and we could easily topple the corrupt government in Khartoum that turns a blind eye to their activities.
We coulddo all of this,
and stay in Iraq. But Sudan is a "special" place in th war on terror, and paticularly to Bin Laden himself. He helpd finance and weaponize their country. He encouraged and supported an Arab regime. Whether he actually made th above statement or not, he and his supporters will not allow America to "liberate" Darfur. That, m friend, would be the definition of quagmire.
Quote:
My point is that as long as we are bogged down in wars of choice like Iraq, we lack the money and mobility to even try to help when all hell is going on somewhere else. That is a cost of the war we are in that needs to be counted along with Iraqi lives and american money and dead soldiers. That yet again genocide is taking plce while we watch and do nothing.
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I have a couple of points in response to this. Firstly, as I said above, I think we could easily stopthe janjaweed, protect Chad's border, and at least hal the acts of genocide. The real struggle would begin however after we did that. We would be "bogged down" in Sudan, too.
Secondly, I know you're not saing this Max, but I'll be damned if you're not coming pretty close to saying that Iraq didn't warrant humanitarian intervention. They most certainly did.
From Global Business Network:
"Along with other human rights organizations, The Documental Centre for Human Rights in Iraq has compiled documentation on over 600,000 civilian executions in Iraq. Human Rights Watch reports that in one operation alone, the Anfal, Saddam killed 100,000 Kurdish Iraqis. Another 500,000 are estimated to have died in Saddam's needless war with Iran. Coldly taken as a daily average for the 24 years of Saddam's reign, these numbers give us a horrifying picture of between 70 and 125 civilian deaths per day for every one of Saddam's 8,000-odd days in power"
You yourself Max said that genocide never went away after WW II. Do you think a Kurd or a Shiite might agree with you???