Ethnic Cleansing, Mass Rapes, Concentration Camps.... why is it that we never have any media coverage or mass support for sending in troops to sort out situations like this, but people are quite happy to go after two-bit dictators like saddam?
30,000 to 1million people are expected to die depending on how quickly aid gets in. Does anyone remember Clinton going to rwanda and appologising and saying something like that should never happen again.
:mad:
It is being called the world's worst humanitarian crisis. Arab militia men have driven an estimate one million black Sudanese villagers from their homes and there have been massacres on an unknown scale.
full story (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3752871.stm)
nope cus russia's been doing it since forever (armenia) and we can't really be using double standards now can we?
Originally posted by toms
Ethnic Cleansing, Mass Rapes, Concentration Camps.... why is it that we never have any media coverage or mass support for sending in troops to sort out situations like this, but people are quite happy to go after two-bit dictators like saddam?
Ummm...Not trying to be argumentative, but weren't there plenty of "Ethnic Cleansing, Mass Rapes, Concentration Camps" under the rule of Saddam, the "two-bit dictator"? I know that's not the reason the U.S. went to Iraq, but I think it's still good to be rid of him.
Saddam was a direct threat to us...
Though I do agree if we could, then we should have helped those people. But, we don't have enough resources too (our military's in Iraq), and we can't help everybody at once.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
Saddam was a direct threat to us...
Though I do agree if we could, then we should have helped those people. But, we don't have enough resources too (our military's in Iraq), and we can't help everybody at once.
But Saddam was neither the worst threat to us nor the worst to it's own people.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
Saddam was a direct threat to us...
Though I do agree if we could, then we should have helped those people. But, we don't have enough resources too (our military's in Iraq), and we can't help everybody at once.
Don't even open that can of worms. Russia was a direct threat to the US in the 1950s and 60s. The only reason we stomped Saddam is because we knew we could.
As far as aiding the crisis in Sudan... Obviously the way humanitarian and peace-keeping missions are handled.. well. It's one giant cluster-****. The UN is certainly more effective than the League of Nations, but it is painfully apparent that greater steps need to be taken. The First-World countries need to show more unity. We cannot operate with fear of bringing other nations to our level. We have to forget capitalism and nationalism for a moment and remember that we are indeed talking about real people here.
These situations needs to be split up, analyzed, and addressed. The US cannot be expected to handle every foreign affair. No one country is capable of helping all countries in the world. But the philosophy of "If you can't help everyone, help no one" does not make any sense. These are people we're talking about. If we, as America, help one country get on its feet, that country may help another.. so on and so forth.
The problem is that we're allowing the cor-political to cloud our moral compass.
This is probably less than coherent. I'm about to vomit/pass out. But I think you'll all be able to catch my general drift.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
Saddam was a direct threat to us...
I really hate to stray off topic, but honestly, HOW was he a direct threat? He had no weapons that had the capabilities of making it to ENGLAND, let alone the states.
I agree that more needs to be done in the way of humanitarian aid, any and all help...well...it helps.
i don't think you can compare the threat of saddam (100s to few thousand) to the situation in sudan (30,000 to die even if we all get in aid now, maybe up to a million if we are too slow). And as far as i am aware Saddam was an evil guy, but they mainly only persecuted those small minority who stood up to him, not tried to wipe out an entire race... (kurds maybe... but that hasn't been a problem for years...)
Even if you took them as comparable (which they are nowhere near) the level of press coverage, political involvement of iraq was hundreds of times greater. hardly anyone has even mentioned sdan.
This is where a lot of the anti-western feeling comes from, the feeling that they are very selective about who they support or oppose. Either 1 million africans aren't worth as much as a few thousand iraqis, or there is something else at work. And you wonder why people don't trust the motives of the US/UK for going into iraq....
PS/ I wasn't saying the US should sort out all the world's problems, other countries need to pay more attention as well, but if they can only do one thing at a time amybe they should be more selective about what they do...
"If you can't help everyone, help no one"
I don't go by that mentality. But I usually dislike when other countries whine about the U.S. not helping "oh on this matter". I merely point out we can't help everyone... and we're already concentrating on one place already, Iraq.
i don't think you can compare the threat of saddam (100s to few thousand) to the situation in sudan
but if they can only do one thing at a time amybe they should be more selective about what they do...
But the point is we've already gone after Saddam, and caught him. Our resources are in Iraq now, and we need to finish our job. We can't just up and run from Iraq and focus on Sudan... can we?
He had no weapons that had the capabilities of making it to ENGLAND, let alone the states.
1) Who ever said he couldn't launch those weapons he had from another country?
2) Terrorism is the connection. Hussein and bin Laden are friends, and through Hussein's stash of money in Iraq, that's funding for al Qaida right there.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
Hussein and bin Laden are friends, and through Hussein's stash of money in Iraq, that's funding for al Qaida right there. Hussein and bin Laden are not friends, nor would they ever possibly be, Saddam is not a religious man.
Saddam wanted a totalitarian government. bin Laden want's a theocracy, a religious based government. Also bin Laden is a religious radicalist, something Saddam condemns and will destroy. I suggest you try and wade through propaganda.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
2) Terrorism is the connection. Hussein and bin Laden are friends, and through Hussein's stash of money in Iraq, that's funding for al Qaida right there.
I can't believe anyone in the world still believes this!!! Even bush never had the guts to outright claim they were firends, he just kept mentioning them in the same sentances to imly a connection where there was none. Seems it may have worked... sigh.
So, by our decision to go to war in iraq (which means we can't now stop the genocide in sudan) we have cost a 20,000 iraqi lives and up to 1 million sudanese lives. But we have saved a maybe few thousand a year from saddam. Nice one. :confused:
Or we could have just not had the CIA help Saddam & bin Laden into power (as far as i can tell their only link is the CIA) and concentrated our efforts on more important things.
Either way...
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
But the point is we've already gone after Saddam, and caught him. Our resources are in Iraq now, and we need to finish our job. We can't just up and run from Iraq and focus on Sudan... can we?
So, I'd stop complaining about not going into Sudan.
By that I don't mean that the cause there is insignificant, of course.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
1) Who ever said he couldn't launch those weapons he had from another country?
Because I'm sure that other countries would be delighted to have a foreign dictator enter their countries with weapons and the intent to attack another sovereign nation with them. :rolleyes:
If it's a country that has a good enough relation with that dictator they would. But either way, it didn't happen.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
If it's a country that has a good enough relation with that dictator they would. But either way, it didn't happen.
because noone is stupid enough to allow Saddam to enter their country with weapons. Then again, he had no weapons to begin with. Thus the point is moot.
I still think we should have gone other places before Iraq (if we were going to do a peacekeeping mission) but we weren't so... whatever.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
If it's a country that has a good enough relation with that dictator they would. But either way, it didn't happen.
Even if Saddam had wanted to, very few leaders of countries are THAT stupid that they'd just let him launch wepaons from their country, because then THEY would be the ones getting pummeled by EVERY nation in the UN.
Sudan? What about Nigeria? That needs cleaning up.
Oh and MH: No country would be stupid enough to aid Hussein in launching so much as a SCUD. Even assuming that Hussein would allow his WMD to leav Iraq, which I seriously doubt, no-one would be aid him for the risk of getting their country bombed to hell and turned into a parking lot. Not even your old friend Gadaffi would be that stupid.
Oh and MH: No country would be stupid enough to aid Hussein in launching so much as a SCUD. Even assuming that Hussein would allow his WMD to leav Iraq, which I seriously doubt, no-one would be aid him for the risk of getting their country bombed to hell and turned into a parking lot. Not even your old friend Gadaffi would be that stupid.
...
Surely Hussein wouldn't tell them he was carrying those weapons. They may be hard to sneak in but knowing him and his friends... it is possible. That doesn't matter anyways.
But yet again my point still stands:
But the point is we've already gone after Saddam, and caught him. Our resources are in Iraq now, and we need to finish our job. We can't just up and run from Iraq and focus on Sudan... can we? So, I'd stop complaining about not going into Sudan.
Kind of pointless talking about what-we-should-have-dones when that doesn't make a difference...
The discussion was not, as I understood it, based around suggestions for concrete courses of action, but rather a comment on the screwed-up priorities of the West in dealing with humanitarian disasters.
Thus it makes perfect sense to debate what-if scenarios.
Originally posted by MennoniteHobbit
Kind of pointless talking about what-we-should-have-dones when that doesn't make a difference...
The majority of the debates in the Senate don't make a difference. In fact I'd say none of them really make a difference, yet we debate the issues all the same.
Fact of the matter is, we went into Iraq to liberate the people from an opressive dictator..(Well, we originally went in to find those WMD's, but once those never showed up, our reason for going in somehow changed...weird how that worked)
But since we did that we've set a precedence, and probably created alot more resentment for us in the third world, particularly those third world countries being opressed by dictators who make Saddam look like Mary Poppins. Why do we accept what's happening to them without so much as a word of protest, when we were willing to send our military to Iraq to stop Saddam.
I don't WANT to be fighting continual wars against dictators. I'm against what they do as much as anyone, but a continual state of war with the death toll of American soldiers rising isn't something I want either. There are people I know in the military, and though it may sound cold, they mean a lot more to me than people I've never met.
I don't have a problem fighting dictators and saving unfortunate human beings on a huge scale. But the unevenness of the application and the unilateral action by one country is what i have a problem with.
If the UN got together and agreed a table of the worst human rights offendors and then a majority of (uncoerced) countries agreed to threaten and then (if necessary) intervene (with a multinationally representative force) then ok. But (a) saddam wouldn't have ranked very high in this table and (b) nations are always looking after their own interests and grudges.
The west has made some major mistakes when trying to police the world in the past. It is not our job. We have created a lot of our own enemies. And did you know that most of the map of the world was drawn up by europeans that were ignorant of how differant peoples were dispersed in specific areas. I am not isolationist, but I do not think we need to go after every single problem. The issue is, that is how super powers fall and lose all their money, they begin policing. At the moment the US army is stretched pretty thin by its standards guarding iraq...no way are we up to taking somthing else up.
We also have no right to establish mass cultural change...
On top of that, the war with Iraq wasn't just to kill Saddam. Iraq gives us another base and vantage point to look over the middle east. The fact is that middle east has a decent amount of power, as where sudan doesn't. I'd love to go and help Sudan, and you are right there are plenty of things we should and can do without using a pure american force and using the UN. The fact is it isn't going to happen...people rarely do anything to help or be nice, we are human, and we keep our best intrests in mind.
i agree that most of it is our fault, and we should in general keep our noses out, but you know... little things like genocide... sort of makes me want to make an exception. But as far as i can tell the world has decided that they are africans and so fairly expendable. :(
Originally posted by Dbl90
We also have no right to establish mass cultural change...
So the US isn't establishing a mass cultural change by establishing democracy in Iraq?
Remember Rwanda people...remember that...