Had I known FaithfulAmerica.org and TrueMajority.com were planning on filming an ad for military intervention in the Sudan I wouldn’t have contributed to their project.
Is the situation dire? Certainly. Is military intervention doable? I don’t think so. When will the United States stop picking fights it doesn’t have the will or ability to finish and apologise for the suffering they incite in its haphazard attempts to reorder the world in its interests?
Samantha Power, while researching “Dying in Darfur” now appearing in The New Yorker, went to great lengths to investigate what is already known. The Sudanese gov’t is acting in collusion with the janjaweed who continue to commit grave atrocities. Sudanese official Salah Gosh is as believable as Donald Rumsfeld regarding Abu Ghraib when he insists these atrocities were committed by a few rotten apples.
Power chides this official for deflecting criticism by drawing comparisons to the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Yet some should be made. She tells the story of Mustafa, (last name withheld), an eighteen-year-old African who has gone into hiding following a brief training period with Sheikh Musa Hilal’s militia. Hilal is a leader of the janjaweed, or the non-combatant leader of Arab tribes that disavows the janjaweed and their pillaging, depending on who is answering the question. Mustafa fled Halil’s camp when he was told he would be fighting the Sudanese Liberation Army. Power infers we should have sympathy for his plight yet aren’t Iraqis who refuse to kill their countrymen in the name of U.S. occupation called terrorists? It’s odd how these things are reasoned out.
Ms. Power doesn’t offer an in-depth analysis of why the United States has been actively supporting an opposition that will settle for nothing less than a unified Sudan under their framework, and in their refusal to consider a secessionist South, have set the stage for an all or nothing ending to this civil war. U.S. policy has partly been driven by ideologues who never experience even a mild arrythmia in reaction to the apartheid of Palestinians yet cannot abide a separated Sudan. These same defenders of unchecked power for anyone not Arab are attempting to spin their unrealistic expectations into a fever-pitched demand for a military application to this situation, and in their stubborn ignorance of what that would entail, fully intend to push the Africans they claim to care about off the cliff should their war cry be heeded.
Drop relief, not bombs. As Winston Churchill preached if not practiced, “Better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.” Or how about this. You can’t take the moral high ground when your self-serving hypocrisy has you sinking in quicksand.
On a related interventionist note:
Margaret Thatcher’s son charged in South Africa over coup plot
Hello
It’s rather interesting that Samantha Power has this article in the New Yorker about Darfur. What Power will never tell you — whether she went to great lengths to figure it out or not — is that the US is arming and funding and training soldiers in Chad, and these militias — some of them Arab militias — are or at least were crossing the border and fighting against the Khartoum government. So you have a very one-sided media propaganda system in which everyone is led to believe that its only the Islamist terrorist government of Khartoum that is responsible for killing all these people in Darfur. No one talks about the US military role through its proxy agents, the Chad government.
The media — and that usually includes Samantha Power — generally make it sound lik ethe US sint at all involved and, goddess! we (read US soldiers) better do something.
Like Rwanda in 1994, nothing could be further from the truth. The US was all over Rwanda in 1994, and Samantha Power knows this, becuase she wrote the latest propaganda smear on RWanda and genocide and she won a Pulitzer for it.
However, Samantha Power is only an expert on the versions of genocide that the system wants you and the people to know about. Enter the New Yorker. ENter Philip Gourevitch, the other expert on genocide that has a lock on the subject at the New Yorker, but whose work is completely one-sided nonsense. WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMMORROW OUR FAMILIES WILL BE KILLED is pro-US propaganda. Compleete nonsense.
Power is a leading ideologue at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard. Interestingly, President of Rwanda and Ft. Leavenworth Kansas trained Paul Kagame, who just sent these troops into Darfur, has met with Power at HArvard at least three times.
Unremarkably unreported anywhere is that one of the world’s premier diamond traders — read organized crime — is on the board of the Harvard AIDS institute. Now, when Samantha Power interviewed all these insiders about genocide in Rwanda she forgot to talk to Mr. Tempelsman. Anyways, I digress. You were talking about Darfur.
Perhaps you would like to elaborate some of these facts in your next blog. Feel free to plagurize entirely. Also see the latest press release on DRC that I published this morning at http://www.SurvivorsRightsInternational.org
regards.
Addendum:
You will find out a little more about the story revolving around the arrest of Mark Thatcher and these coup-plotters in teh same press release on DRC at Survivor’s Rights International. What the world should be asking is, what about Tim Spicer and Tony Buckingham?
read more about all this at http://www.allthingspass.com
keith harmon snow