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By: Ian Essling
Hypocrisy always amazes me. It makes me shake my head when people who consider themselves intelligent say things that are just so absurd and hypocritical that I can barely debate the topic without having this insane urge to shove a pair of rusty nails in my ears to stop the pain.
My newest issue? Darfur. Oh yes, we all know about Darfur. Genocide, slaughter, time to donate money, blah blah, whine, whine. We know the facts (well, I shouldn't say that; I know the facts, for sure, but I think a lot of the pro-Darfur crowd are sorely misinformed): the Janjaweed militia is killing a lot of people, and the Sudanese government is supporting them.
Now, the part I don't get is why are the lives of those victims in Darfur more important than those same kind of victims in Iraq? Apparently, they are, at least according to the liberal activists of this country.
Saddam Hussein gassed 100,000s of Kurds in the '90s, and his Baath party persecuted and ethnically cleansed anyone that he felt like pointing a finger at. That's the same kind of thing that's happening in Sudan, but the same people who are screaming for us to go into Darfur are the same ones demanding we pull out of Iraq. What gives?
Faster than Ted Kennedy can down a bottle of scotch (and that's pretty damn fast), liberals usually come back at me when I say this with the argument of, "It was none of our business to go to Iraq."
Why, then, is it our business to go to Darfur? It's a simple question, but the answer isn't nearly as simple. If you want to say that nothing is our business, then we should go back to pre-WWII isolationism, and we can pull our foreign aid from the hundreds of countries we are supporting and just bury our heads in the sand. Or, we can continue to stick our noses into situations that need to be fixed, such as Iraq and Darfur.
The problem is that a lot of the people who are clamoring for us to invade Darfur (and yes, it would be an invasion) don't understand that by doing so, we are obligating ourselves to go fight every human rights violation in the world.
It's terrible what's happening in Sudan, I agree, but what was happening in Iraq was terrible, what's happening in North Korea is terrible, and what's happening in China is terrible.
If we are going to be the world's police, than we must take care of the other human rights violations on the planet. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it. You cannot be selective here; just because it's vogue to bash one and support the other doesn't mean that that course of action is right. In my experience, what's vogue is usually the polar opposite of what's right, but that's just my personal cynicism.
People who think that we can make any sort of difference in Sudan by just dropping humanitarian aid are kidding themselves. Does anyone remember how badly we screwed up Somalia by doing just that? If we give the defenseless villagers supplies, the second we leave (or sooner), the army will run out of the jungle, slaughter the people and pick up the supplies.
What would end up happening is we would have to fight off these militants in order to protect the populace, and it would turn into a bloody fight through the jungles and harsh terrain of Sudan as our troops tried to fight insurgents who know the area far better. Sound familiar? You bet it does; we would be in a similar situation to Iraq, and within a few months, the people who staged hunger strikes to get us to go to Darfur would be gorging themselves to make us come back.
I guess I'm just tired of the double standards. If you slap a "Save Darfur" sticker on your car, you are a hero, but if you put one saying "Win in Iraq," you would probably get run off the road by a ravenous pack of Prius-driving activists. It's vogue to walk around 'supporting' Darfur, or to donate a dollar here and there to some random Darfur charity, but in reality, all that kind of stuff does is bump up the self-esteem of those who are doing it. No one should actually believe that wearing a sticker is going to help those people over there.
Darfur is not strictly a poverty situation that can be fixed by throwing money at it; Darfur will need a military response to have any sort of positive resolution, and the anti-war activists protesting Iraq and demanding action in Darfur need to realize this.
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