<p>(Just received the following notice via email) </p>
<p>Dear Friend, </p>
<p>I have some exciting news.</p>
<p>This Sunday, the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” will air a story about the genocide in Darfur. </p>
<p>The Sudanese government restricts reporters from entering the region, but CBS correspondent Scott Pelley and his 60 Minutes crew went anyway, putting their lives in jeopardy. </p>
<p>It is sure to be a haunting and truthful piece.</p>
American is trying to act through the United Nations and through African countries. The fact that they are ineffective so far is not our fault. </p>
<p>American has no security, military, economic or other interest in that region and we should stay out. I see no reason to risk the life of any American soldiers to protect anyone involved in the Darfur conflict. Can anyone of you explain why Darfur is so important that America should get involved militarily?</p>
<p>I agree. Turning our backs on genocide is the worst kind of immorality. If we weren’t so militarily bogged down in Iraq, we could afford to commit troops to Darfur, but that would first require a national knowledge of the tragedy, and a public mandate to do something about it. </p>
<p>But, it’s not just the U.S. who apparently couldn’t give a S*%t. The rest of the world seems singularly disinterested in intervening as well. There should be a strong international response to the horror being played out in that part Africa. Unfortunately, Razorsharp’s attitude reflects that of most of the world’s nations: Darfur represents no compelling interests, other than a humanitarian one. But really, who seems to care if Black Africans wipe each other off the map?</p>
<p>I agree. Turning our backs on genocide is the worst kind of immorality. If we weren’t so militarily bogged down in Iraq, we could afford to commit troops to Darfur, but that would first require a national knowledge of the tragedy, and a public mandate to do something about it. </p>
<p>But, it’s not just the U.S. who apparently couldn’t give a S*%t. The rest of the world seems singularly disinterested in intervening as well. There should be a strong international response to the horror being played out in that part Africa. Unfortunately, Razorsharp’s attitude reflects that of most of the world’s nations: Darfur represents no compelling interests, other than a humanitarian one. But really, who seems to care if Black Africans wipe each other off the map?</p>
<p>what about the countries who pulled their troops out of the Iraq stuff? Why doesn’t France send some troops to Darfur?</p>
<p>The US is trying to act. The US wants to pass resolutions in the UN that say that genocide is happening, but THE UN WON’T PASS THEM. China has huge interests in the area. Everything wrong in the world is not the fault of the US.</p>
<p>Also… what if the international community puts in “white” peacekeepers, and the warring factions are united in a religious fight against the imperialist West?</p>
<p>What is so wrong about protecting our economic interests in Iraq? If you consider that our country runs on oil, it’s not surprising that we have a vested interest in keeping plentiful and cheap supplies of it; likewise, stability in the middle east benefits us.</p>
<p>Our government has no reason to be involved there as its stability doesn’t really affect us, nor do we have any political, economic, or martial interests there. I agree the situation is horrible, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to risk American lives to stop it either. What are you supposed to tell the men you’re sending off to die? Here’s a better question: would you be willing to die for Sudan?</p>
<p>In a moral society, we ought to care about genocide.</p>
<p>That was supposedly a reason for invading Iraq. How many people have told me that we “needed to depose that big bad Saddam, who was putting people into meat grinders”? That was many people’s justification for the invasion!!</p>
<p>Are you willing to die for oil? And we haven’t even protected our supply (even though that pipe line is almost finished, along with our permanent military bases).</p>
<p>Here is what I do not understand about liberals. They go crazy about places like Darfur and suggest the U.S. should take military action because people are dying in what is essentially a civil war. But then they object with equal passion about the U.S. “going it alone” in places like Iraq where there is just as much if not more killing by a dictator AND there is a risk of WMD (at least that is what Bill Clinton and John Kerry told us.) If the liberals are right and the US should have stayed out of Iraq despite the killing and torture by Saddam, how can they take the position that President Bush must act like a Cowboy and send American troops to die in Africa? There is simply no logic to the liberal point of view.</p>
<p>Biggest death toll in Iraq (according to UNICEF) was from Clinton’s policy of genocide: more than 400,000 children under the age of five, and likely another 600,000 on top of that, from the destruction of wastewater treatment facilities, and the ban on simple antibiotics to combat dysentery. </p>
<p>Virtually every family in Iraq lost a child under Bill Clinton. If the vast majority approve of killing Americans today, it is not at all surprising - how would you feel if the Secretary of State of the occupying power, when faced with the reality of the children’s deaths said, “we think it was worth it?”</p>
<p>I for one, never called for unilateral U.S. involvement in the Darfur genocide. I’m chagrined by an largely global indifference that allows the situation to grow more dire by the day.</p>
<p>I concur with Poet, 100%/. It is the worldwide neglect of this genocide, of the indifference and apathy, that is most horrifying, particularly among the the civilized, Western countries. They have simply turned their backs…all of them.</p>
What a turn of events…that’ll drench the self-righteous fire in the panties of the perennial-protester and the casually concerned malcontent. Good for you, AM! Done yer-self good.</p>
<p>…still limiting your diatribe to “Western Countries,” (perhaps China, Japan, South Korea, India, Malaysia…(well over half of the residents of this planet) are not “civilized” enough, as you say, to be held to the same normative moral standard in your metaphysics…or dreamscape.</p>
<p>This is why, so often, while the self-styled liberal do-gooder is wetting themselves, the fire does get taken out of mankind’s moral shorts. In this country, amongst the whining-class, nothing is humanitarian; it is always self-righteous and political, because, that is where the “real” heart of the malcontent lies.</p>
<p>Darfur, and other events like it, that currently plague our planet are all subject to the indignation of the self-styled and pouting do-gooder; sadly, playing such games merely gums up every caring-human’s intentions and sadly, very often the “caring” itself. America has been ahead of the curve on this one…you’d never know that listening to the malcontent-blame-America-first crowd pout. Allow that helping countries like Sudan out of their moral morass and genocidal tendencies is the patriotic thing to do, rather than using the tragedy as a stick to beat the “dumb-American” with would go a long way toward changing sentiments where they absolutely need changing.</p>
<p>Darfur and Sudan are, however you cut it, first a tragedy of Sudan, then Africa, then the world (of which America is an important part)–not the table-talk of political elitists: It deserves more than cheap political slogans and short-sighted hypocrisy: more than a political pose. It deserves a patriotic effort of Americans, not another diatribe of “hate-America-first.”</p>
<p>And, as your moral self, FS, you choose to blahblahblah and accept the status quo of murder and forced expellation in Darfur?</p>
<p>Very telling.</p>
<p>This isn’t partisan at all. Quit turning it into a partisan discussion. I thought the Rwandan genocide, which was ignored as well, and by a Democratic administration, was equally heinous. </p>
<p>When the WORLD turns its back on genocide, it says very little about its inhabitants.</p>