May 31_2007 – My Cynicism About Darfur

I keep seeing these heart rending stories about the slaughter going on in the Darfur a province of Sudan. But it makes me wonder,what it is exactly that this slick lobbying campaign and its bank rollers would have “us” (using “us” in the collective sense of it, as in the American government) do exactly? Many if not most of the noisy pleaders whose message is directed at the US Congress and the Bush Administration are the same subset of persons and groups that are currently loudly denouncing the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan too. Go figure that? Haven't these folks seen exactly what happens when one nation, no matter how powerful and well-off it may be comparatively, tries to establish itself as the World Cop?

Let the UN and the African Union handle this one you guys. America's plate is full right now with other more pressing imperial entanglements. Again, what, (military intervention, boycotts, airstrikes, blockades, something else?) would these maudlin interventionists have “us” do? I honestly wonder what the real agenda is here.

“Lobbying groups regularly get their way in Washington”, says this article from the Washington Post, “but few have had as much impact in a short period as the Save Darfur Coalition, an organization that has been pressing for international intervention in war-torn Sudan.

Over the past two years, it has flooded lawmakers' inboxes with pleas for assistance, filled the Mall with protesters and blanketed the airwaves with heart-rending commercials. One ad showed photos of anguished, starving Sudanese and asked, 'How will history judge us?' "

History has already judged this sort of thing; and the honest truth is that the interventionists are nearly always wrong. And yet with each new crisis they persist. History doesn't repeat”, said Mark Twain, “ but it often rhymes.” And we know how this kinda song goes too, even if we only know the melody and not the words.