We Americans have an excuse. We have an idiot President who has us up to our eyeballs in Iraq. No troops to spare, and not enough oil in Sudan to interest us…plus Dubya doesn’t really give a flyin’ fuck about Africans.
But what is Europe’s excuse? Why isn’t anyone doing anything?
What exactly are you suggesting that Europe should do? I agree that we’ve got an international emergency in Sudan, but short of lighting up the Batbeacon and letting superheroes take care of it, what is the proposed mechanism for handling the emergency?
As of 1 February, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Sudan released its report strongly recommending that “the Security Council immediately refer the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court.”
IANAL but it looks to me as though the Court is the right venue for dealing with the Darfur crimes:
So things might move somewhat faster if the US would agree to refer Sudan to the ICC. However, they still wouldn’t be moving particularly fast—nowhere near as fast as necessary to halt the current disaster going on in Darfur.
This is part of the problem that I’ve mentioned around here before as the “failure of liberal internationalism” in dealing with things like humanitarian and peacekeeping interventions. I’m a committed liberal internationalist myself, and I think on the whole it’s a preferable approach to militant unilateralism. But there’s no denying that when the community of nations is faced with a civil war or other barbarities within a sovereign nation, the community of nations is awfully slow to get off its duff and stop the killing.
IMO, this is largely because we haven’t really figured out a workable balance between defense of universal human rights and respect for national sovereignty. Civilized nations simply can’t be permitted to invade other countries without what the world in general agrees is sufficient justification. On the other hand, that means that while the world argues about the justification issue, innocent people die at the hands of brutal and unscrupulous leaders. Responsible international governance hamstrings itself by its very insistence on being responsibly international.
And the resulting leadership vacuum provides the excuse for unilateral military adventurism. The US invasion of Iraq was a bad thing in many respects, but it could claim legitimacy partly on the undeniable grounds that nobody else was really doing anything effective about the horrific regime of Saddam Hussein.
I think the ICC is a step in the right direction in making international governance more genuinely effective, but we still have a long way to go. Show me a way to get there better and faster, and I’m with you.
If your claim is that Africa is not a big enough priority for the US, I’d agree with you. But you said
[Please indicate what leads you to the conclusion that this administration makes Africa a lower priority than others?
](Geldof back in Ethiopia | Emergency planning | The Guardian)
It’s just fuckin’ killing you, ain’t it? All the good things happening happening in the Middle East right now.
Oh, America’s so terrible, we know that because that’s the received wisdom, but where are those awesome worldly Europeans, who also didn’t intervene in Rwanda, or the Sudan last time, or Somalia, and who even needed US leadership to handle Bosnia right in their back yard? Where’s wonderful Europe, who held massive protests against Reagan’s Soviet strategy right until the Berlin Wall was for sale in their airport shops? Where’s marvelous Europe, for whom even the UN-approved sanctions against Iraq were too inconvenient so they traded around them with the oil-for-food scandal, enriching Saddam at the direct dollar-for-dollar cost of his people and who would later say it was the US who didn’t respect the UN? Yes, where are those human-rights-loving Europeans?
The answer is that Europe doesn’t go anyplace that it doesn’t have a bunch of colonists. That’s why France is in their former colony the Ivory Coast – there’s still French people there controlling the economy.
Invade 'em. Just drop 50,000 or so troops on the country and, like the song says, take all the rope in Texas, find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys and hang them high in the street.
Nothing would please me more than to find my last post proved horribly, embarrassingly incorrect. I would dance on my error and promise to name my first kid Jacques Gerhard manhattan. Europe should invade, or the US should, or, ghod-forbid, they should get together and do it as a team. Even Russia should. Or freaking somebody. Hell, right now I think I’d settle for Libya, even knowing the complications that would cause.
England is Europe too.
I’m curious as to why you feel Europe is obligated to do anything.
Because Europe created nearly every state on that Continent. And the blame for the troubles of ethnic violence and massacres is due to their own short sightedness.
Africa needs a majority of its states broken up and redrawn on ethnic lines, its the only way to achieve some sort of stability where the people of a certain state aren’t at each others throats half the time.
And you think that gives us blood on our heads for all eternity? Personally I leave the original sin to the Catholics. Africa’s problems are of own creation, ethnic violence and massacres their own responsibility. Of course that doesn’t mean one can’t believe Europe still has a moral obligation to help if it could, being our brother’s keeper and all that. And (some of) Europe’s pathetic attempt to ride the moral hoppy horse with words should imbue them with some measure of intent to live it out in action – if they had any shame, which still have to be shown.
And none of that alters the fact that Europe is pathetically weak. Which European country is it you expect to have the will and means to control and secure a country the size of France against a determined guerrilla movement?
Why doesn’t the Islamic world send their troops in to help out? Personally, I feel that intervention in these African civil wars won’t help anything. Africa will continue to have these conflicts as long as it remains a tribal society. look at Somalia…they really didn’t want to be helped…they prefer to fight eachother.
Let these civil wars burn themselves out…and then maybe a new generation of African leaders will emerge…and straighten things out.
Because number one
they don’t care,
Number two
they’d rather see them at each others throats as for them not to develop, also, racism, as black Muslims are regarded as lower by their Arab counterparts.
I agree – but if the ICC does hand down indictments of the national, local, and militia leaders in question – whose job is it to go in and bell the cat?
Average fuel price in the U.S. is $1.95 per gallon. The cheapest in my area is $2.02 per gallon. Oil prices worldwide are up.
Eventually I’m going to stop believing spurious claims that the U.S. acts militarily solely for purposes of oil and demand proof.
The individual states might be weak. But collectively – NATO would be a pretty formidable fighting force even if the Americans and Canadians pulled out of it. If the EU had its own European Army, it would be quite capable of intervening effectively in Sudan.
Cite?
Sudan was never heavily colonized by any European nation, but it was British colony – sort of – that is, it was a colony of Egypt, which was under British control from 1882 to 1922, while remaining nominally a territory of the Ottoman Empire. Sudan remained under British rule until 1956. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudan#History So maybe the Brits could pitch in and help here? Stiff upper lip, duty to the Empire, all that sort of thing?
Errmm . . . you’re skipping a step there, Cheese. You’re simply assuming that when our leaders act to get control of oil, and win, that should translate into ordinary Americans paying lower prices at the pump. But that’s not what “control of oil” means to our leaders; it means, simply, being in a position to control the oil – and to supply it or deny it to our rivals, such as India and China and Russia. More importantly, it means preventing anybody else from controlling the oil – anybody who did would have America by the short and curlies, as we found out in the 1970s.
What the hell, do you even know what Darfur is about?
My understanding (based on previous thread discussions with Tamerlane) is that it’s partly an ethnic conflict, partly way-of-life: “Arab” (i.e., Arabic-speaking) nomadic pastoralists vs. non-Arab farmers – like an Old West range war, only bloodier. But in color, the two groups are pretty much the same. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict:
On a related note, how is that prosecution of Slobo going?