This is what I’m talking about!
Shout out to Eric for posting the link to this on his blog. A fairly accurate assessment of the U.S. government’s position on Darfur, with the exception that his advice to the U.S. about how to interact with the security council should be taken with a grain of salt.
The situation must be dealt with a bit more diplomatically than he seems to imply, although I agree that action must be taken…and anyone hwho disagrees with that statement and thinks the U.S. should railroad said UN and its Security Council should think back a few years and try to remember what their reaction was to the U.S. doing just that over the war in Iraq. It makes me mad when people change their minds about U.S. Foreign Relations policy depending on what issues happen to be on the table.
That said, I applaud Mr. Cheadle for his stance on this topic and encourage all and sundry to write letters to Congress, the President, etc. Details on how to do that to be posted sometime soon! In the meantime, read this:
http://platform.blogs.com/passionofthepresent/2005/03/the_darfur_geno.html
March 29th, 2005 at 1:49 am
When I first started reading up on Sudan a few weeks ago, I was totally struck by the number of those who were proposing railroading the UN and how most of them probably threw a fit when we did the same thing with Iraq (although our Iraq proposal did pass through the security council, so I don’t know how much railroading actually went on.)
Anyway, thats a long and incoherent post that I won’t leave here. What really jumped out at me in this column was the part were he pointed out that our lack of action was based on the fact that the situation in Darfur in not a security threat to us. One of the things that really frustrated me about Iraq is that there was a genocide going on that (that STILL nobody ever talks about, but there were at least 200,000 killed by Saddam’s regieme). But we never were all that concerend with bringing “freedom and democracy” to the middle east untill we were attacked. And since we are not likely to be attacked by anyone in this region, I fear it may never become a priority.