Limbaugh on Darfur: Racism on Steroids

Globalism and Darfur Unlike Iraq, where our unilateralism has run amok, the conflict in Darfur is a multilateral concern for the global community.

Yup.  And in true multilateral fashion, the problem is being studied and pondered and fiddled about to — term used precisely — death. 

The implicit notion, though, that the entire rest of the world is collectively incapable of putting sufficient boots on the ground to act (it would hardly be possible to act “precipitously,” after the Sudanese government and their Janjaweed have murdered hundreds of thousands and displaced millions of others over quite literally years and years) is absurd. 

Yup.  It’s genocide, and the US has shamefully failed to act, what with its combat forces at best almost overcommitted elsewhere (for good reason and/or ill). 

Meanwhile, what troops the UN has sent in have been worse than useless — unless one’s of the opinion that what the situation needed was more rape (I’m of the contrary opinion) — and the neighboring countries, with armed forces number in the multiple millions (Egypt alone has almost half a million troops; Darfur is quite literally in driving distances from Egypt) are sitting on their collective . . . hands.

“Global in spirit”?  Yeah, condemnation of genocide is usually global in spirit.  But it’s also, once again, global in inaction, and global in pious pronouncements.

U.S. Leadership necessary I hear your frustration with the inaction of the U.N. and neighboring countries such as Egypt. And it’s a valid point.

But the U.S. has been the de facto leader of the world for sometime. Conflicts in that magnititude need a lots of political, economical and military capital; Neither the U.N nor the EU has that.

But even without military involvement (which isn’t easy to come by for good reasons), the Bush administration has done little to help people of Darfur.

It’s been mostly average Americans, activists and now localities–just like the anti-aparthied in South Africa started.

The genocide is not universally condemned The Arab League has refused to say or do much about it and would strongly resist US-led intervention, or any intervenion. China woud be enraged by US intervention – they are buddies with Sudan, because of oil I believe.

Any US-led intervention – and any meaningful intervention would be US-led – would be condemned by a gradually-growing chorus as hegemony and imperialism in action.

There seems to be no possible long-term peace available; the result woud be another quagmire, although one that started out with less unpoularity than Iraq. But it would not be squeaky clean and wonderful in the eyes of all others, either.

I did a search – Oil Darfur. The first result, from a place called “The Wisdom Fund” –

http://www.twf.org/N…

The tease:

“Sudan, Oil, and the Darfur Crisis”

“Are the U.S. and Britain seeking a pretext for intervention in order to take advantage of Sudan’s oil?”

The Arab League is hardly alone Speaking of groups that refuse to call the Darfur massacre a genocide, the United Nations as of today shied away from such charecterization.

I wouldn’t dispute that U.S. involvement wouldn’t be clean, but with much more global support, suffocating Sudan and ultimately pressuring it to stop the bloodletting isn’t that hard.

Though they love cheap oil, the Chinese would like to do business with government that has far less bad propoganda. They have dispatched a “special envoy” to Sudan who sort of convinced Khartoum to talk to its adversaries.

I’ll agree that the US hasn’t done enough posturing… … but there’s been plenty of posturing done.  Thugs, however, like the Sudanese government and their janjaweed, though, aren’t affected by Laumeresque Strong Expressions of Concern With Hints of Barely Withheld Restraint — like their counterparts throughout history, what moves them are 1.  the effective use of force, and 2.  upon occasion, the credible (if not necessary public) threats of effective use of force. 

As a parallel, it wasn’t the Dayton Accords that minimized (not quite ended) the move toward genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina; it was the demonstrated willingness of Western militaries to keep killing people and breaking things.

That said, the extent to which the US should be the world’s policeman is disputed, and there are people of good will along all points in the political spectrum who think the US should be very, very careful about whether and when the US should — even when the bizarre moral legitimacy of the present day is added by a UN resolution and the presence of decorative troops from the Canary Islands, the UAE, and/or Belgium — be willing to do that, or threaten to do that.  (I’m one of those; so, apparently, are you.)

The US military is very, very good at killing people and breaking things — the best the world has ever seen — but to the extent that Strong Expressions of Concern With Hints of Barely Withheld Restraint could do the job, the UN would have already stopped the genocide.  More of “never mind that the horse is blind, just keep loading the wagon” isn’t going to help.

Orthogonally… … I don’t know how to stop the genocide in Darfur, absent sufficient boots on the ground with a mandate to kill and break appropriately; I do know how it’s possible to continue to make things worse:  continue the global posturing, while continuing to work on making sure that the victims have difficulty in getting outside arms to protect themselves.

By no particular coincidence, that’s just what’s going on . . . with, apparently, the addition of a new, “improved” force of UN babyrapers to observe the slaughter . . . the “improvement” being African Union babysitters.

Yup. You’re getting the diplomacy and the international pressure that you think will do the job.  Let’s see how many more innocents are murdered in Darfur — and at what pace — while that goes on.  My prediction is that it will slow . . . but only when the Sudanese thugs and their janjaweed find that ethnic cleansing has made it difficult to find victims, just as overhunting deer, at one point in living memory (although barely) made it difficult for hunters to shoot deer in Minnesota.  The UN will then take credit when “only”, say, 50,000 locals are murdered in a given year, and hope that it drops down to 40,000 in the following year.

(There are other differences, granted; I don’t think deer hunting is in and of itself immoral — I feel rather differently about genocide.)

Militarily — as an utterly armchair general; you should talk to somebody who really knows both the military, the terrain, and the cultures much better than I do — I don’t think that killing and breaking enough to halt the genocide is an insuperable problem, but it has gotten worse, and will continue to get worse.  It’s not a close parallel, but there was a time when the Third Reich could actually have been stopped by a single French division, and in living memory, it’s hard to think of a less effective military force than a French division.

Globalism and Darfur Unlike Iraq, where our unilateralism has run amok, the conflict in Darfur is a multilateral concern for the global community.

Yup.  And in true multilateral fashion, the problem is being studied and pondered and fiddled about to — term used precisely — death. 

The implicit notion, though, that the entire rest of the world is collectively incapable of putting sufficient boots on the ground to act (it would hardly be possible to act “precipitously,” after the Sudanese government and their Janjaweed have murdered hundreds of thousands and displaced millions of others over quite literally years and years) is absurd. 

Yup.  It's genocide, and the US has shamefully failed to act, what with its combat forces at best almost overcommitted elsewhere (for good reason and/or ill). 

Meanwhile, what troops the UN has sent in have been worse than useless — unless one's of the opinion that what the situation needed was more rape (I'm of the contrary opinion) — and the neighboring countries, with armed forces number in the multiple millions (Egypt alone has almost half a million troops; Darfur is quite literally in driving distances from Egypt) are sitting on their collective . . . hands.

“Global in spirit”?  Yeah, condemnation of genocide is usually global in spirit.  But it's also, once again, global in inaction, and global in pious pronouncements.

U.S. Leadership necessary I hear your frustration with the inaction of the U.N. and neighboring countries such as Egypt. And it's a valid point.

But the U.S. has been the de facto leader of the world for sometime. Conflicts in that magnititude need a lots of political, economical and military capital; Neither the U.N nor the EU has that.

But even without military involvement (which isn't easy to come by for good reasons), the Bush administration has done little to help people of Darfur.

It's been mostly average Americans, activists and now localities–just like the anti-aparthied in South Africa started.

The genocide is not universally condemned The Arab League has refused to say or do much about it and would strongly resist US-led intervention, or any intervenion. China woud be enraged by US intervention – they are buddies with Sudan, because of oil I believe.

Any US-led intervention – and any meaningful intervention would be US-led – would be condemned by a gradually-growing chorus as hegemony and imperialism in action.

There seems to be no possible long-term peace available; the result woud be another quagmire, although one that started out with less unpoularity than Iraq. But it would not be squeaky clean and wonderful in the eyes of all others, either.

I did a search – Oil Darfur. The first result, from a place called “The Wisdom Fund” –

http://www.twf.org/N…

The tease:

“Sudan, Oil, and the Darfur Crisis”

“Are the U.S. and Britain seeking a pretext for intervention in order to take advantage of Sudan's oil?”

The Arab League is hardly alone Speaking of groups that refuse to call the Darfur massacre a genocide, the United Nations as of today shied away from such charecterization.

I wouldn't dispute that U.S. involvement wouldn't be clean, but with much more global support, suffocating Sudan and ultimately pressuring it to stop the bloodletting isn't that hard.

Though they love cheap oil, the Chinese would like to do business with government that has far less bad propoganda. They have dispatched a “special envoy” to Sudan who sort of convinced Khartoum to talk to its adversaries.

I'll agree that the US hasn't done enough posturing… … but there's been plenty of posturing done.  Thugs, however, like the Sudanese government and their janjaweed, though, aren't affected by Laumeresque Strong Expressions of Concern With Hints of Barely Withheld Restraint — like their counterparts throughout history, what moves them are 1.  the effective use of force, and 2.  upon occasion, the credible (if not necessary public) threats of effective use of force. 

As a parallel, it wasn't the Dayton Accords that minimized (not quite ended) the move toward genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina; it was the demonstrated willingness of Western militaries to keep killing people and breaking things.

That said, the extent to which the US should be the world's policeman is disputed, and there are people of good will along all points in the political spectrum who think the US should be very, very careful about whether and when the US should — even when the bizarre moral legitimacy of the present day is added by a UN resolution and the presence of decorative troops from the Canary Islands, the UAE, and/or Belgium — be willing to do that, or threaten to do that.  (I'm one of those; so, apparently, are you.)

The US military is very, very good at killing people and breaking things — the best the world has ever seen — but to the extent that Strong Expressions of Concern With Hints of Barely Withheld Restraint could do the job, the UN would have already stopped the genocide.  More of “never mind that the horse is blind, just keep loading the wagon” isn't going to help.

Orthogonally… … I don't know how to stop the genocide in Darfur, absent sufficient boots on the ground with a mandate to kill and break appropriately; I do know how it's possible to continue to make things worse:  continue the global posturing, while continuing to work on making sure that the victims have difficulty in getting outside arms to protect themselves.

By no particular coincidence, that's just what's going on . . . with, apparently, the addition of a new, “improved” force of UN babyrapers to observe the slaughter . . . the “improvement” being African Union babysitters.

Yup. You're getting the diplomacy and the international pressure that you think will do the job.  Let's see how many more innocents are murdered in Darfur — and at what pace — while that goes on.  My prediction is that it will slow . . . but only when the Sudanese thugs and their janjaweed find that ethnic cleansing has made it difficult to find victims, just as overhunting deer, at one point in living memory (although barely) made it difficult for hunters to shoot deer in Minnesota.  The UN will then take credit when “only”, say, 50,000 locals are murdered in a given year, and hope that it drops down to 40,000 in the following year.

(There are other differences, granted; I don't think deer hunting is in and of itself immoral — I feel rather differently about genocide.)

Militarily — as an utterly armchair general; you should talk to somebody who really knows both the military, the terrain, and the cultures much better than I do — I don't think that killing and breaking enough to halt the genocide is an insuperable problem, but it has gotten worse, and will continue to get worse.  It's not a close parallel, but there was a time when the Third Reich could actually have been stopped by a single French division, and in living memory, it's hard to think of a less effective military force than a French division.