Guys,
“The Nation” magazine has an automatic email program that sends a message recommending a pretty sensible (!) multilateral plan of action to our Secretary of State to stop an enormous humanitarian crisis in Sudan–which has already undergone tragedy that defies the imagination from Islamist tyranny, Civil War, genocide and, yes, chattel slavery.
Emails to the State Dept. coming from “The Nation” might be uncharacteristically persuasive because Sudan has not been a pet cause of the New Left, which has averted its eyes in favor of outing racism in the West.
So please check out this letter and sign, and afterwards it allows you to send the link to 6 people:
There is also an editorial in The New Republic recommending basically the same course of action.
"Given our commitment in Iraq, the U.S. military is stretched too thin to provide many troops in Darfur. (And, despite all its moralistic talk, few in the Bush administration have ever shown much enthusiasm for using the U.S. military to save African lives.) But we can offer logistical and airlift support. And, if even a fraction of the 2,000 American troops currently stationed in nearby Djibouti were transferred to Darfur, they would have a dramatic psychological impact, encouraging other countries to volunteer more troops and showing Khartoum that the world’s only superpower will no longer stand idly by. Remember, some 200 American ground troops helped end the violence in Liberia last summer.
As we editorialized last week (“Were We Wrong?” June 28), one of the great moral dangers of America’s intervention in Iraq is that it will undermine America’s ability–and its will–to prevent ethnic cleansing and mass murder in other parts of the globe. We are now confronting that danger in Darfur. If President Bush wants to show the world that his moral rhetoric was sincere in Iraq, he now has his chance, in Sudan."
From what I have been hearing, our military has been stretched to it’s limits with occupying Iraq and won’t be able to take on any new conflicts at this point in time.
We are pulling troops from South Korea and Europe to send to Iraq, so I doubt we’ll send any significant number of troops to Sudan.
I’d like to see us do something in Sudan, but we’ve already overextended ourselves with our shitty post-war (lack of) planning in Iraq.
Trust Lumpy to turn a positive proactive action in Sudan (clearly mapped out for him as LOGISTICALLY FEASIBLE by both The New Republic and The Nation!) into just another dig at the administration’s decision to enter Iraq.
100s of 1000s are about to die, big deal, as long as we get to say something bad about Bush. That’s Lumpy’s Chomskian altruism.
I don’t think we should be the world’s police and I don’t think our troops deserve to be sent into that situation. You hear this stuff happening in an African country every five minutes and there’s like 50 tiny ass countries over there. I don’t think those people can be helped. Maybe we can save them by shipping them over here, where they can fit into places like Maine and be introduced to running water and doorknobs. I have compassion for people suffering in hellish conditions, but the United States cannot save everyone. It’s just the hard truth. Just like we can’t take on all immigrant commers from every third world corner of the world.