Ranting to /dev/null

"Doing nothing does not mean that nothing happens"

Hitch again has a great piece in which he lays out the horrors of peace, in this case the world's apparently first successful genocide. The killing in Darfur is largely over. Why? Because there isn't anyone left to kill. Why? Because we didn't go to war.

Describing the West's failure under similar circumstances in Rwanda, he describes what would have been the case if we had done our job and gone in there, guns blazing. Money quote:

"It is a certainty that at some stage, American troops would have had to open fire on the "Hutu Power" mobs and militias, actually killing people and very probably getting killed in return. Body bags would have been involved. It is not an absolute certainty that all detained members of those militias would have been treated with unfailing tenderness. It is probable that some of the military contractors would have overcharged, and that some locals would have engaged in profiteering and even in tribal politics. It is impossible that any child of any member of the Clinton administration would have been an enlisted soldier. But we never had to suffer any of these wrenching experiences, so that we can continue to wish, in some parallel Utopian universe, that we had done something instead of nothing.

Or not exactly nothing. The United States ended up supporting the French military intervention in Rwanda, which was mounted in an attempt not to remove the genocidaires but to save them. Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder. Thank heaven that we are tough enough to bear the shame of this, and strong enough to forgive ourselves."

You never know when somethin' needs killed.

Posted by ryan at November 9, 2005 07:20 AM | TrackBack