Mark Steyn Explains Darfur For The Holly-weird Moonbats
You have to love Mark Steyn when he is on target. (To date, I am unaware of when he has ever been off target on any serious issue.) Today is no exception. People like George "Looney" Clooney think that we need to have a strong multinational force to protect the civilians in Darfur. I agree. There is slaughter going on in Darfur that is reminiscent of Rwanda and Zimbabwe. But, as Mark points out, if Clooney is talking about the United Nations, then he is a bigger fool than what we credit him to be.
I SEE George Clooney and Angelina Jolie have discovered Darfur and are now demanding "action". Good for them. Hollywood hasn't shown this much interest in indigenous groups of the Sudan since John Payne and Jerry Colonna sang The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish in Garden of the Moon (1938).
I wish the celebs well. Those of us who wanted action on Darfur years ago will hope their advocacy produces more results than ours did. Clooney's concern for the people of the region appears to be genuine and serious. But unless he's also serious about backing the only forces in the world with the capability and will to act in Sudan, he's just another showboating pretty boy of no use to anyone.
Here's the lesson of the past three years: The UN kills.
Maybe Clooney will recall the numerous scandals that have plagued the UN over the past few years. The food-for-sex scandal in the Congo where UN peacekeepers stole the innocence of girls barely above ten years old just so those girls could take some food home to their families. And Mark talked about that here; he highlighted "Kofi's Dollar Girls." And then there is the Oil-For-Fraud scandal where we shoveled billions down a bottomless rat-hole, and into the pockets of a brutal dictator (which we had to go and deal with in 2003) and those higher-ups in the UN. Oh yeah. The UN's a good starting point. NOT!
In 2003, you'll recall, the US was reviled as a unilateralist cowboy because it and its coalition of the poodles waged an illegal war unauthorised by the UN against a sovereign state run by a thug regime that was no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders, which it killed in large numbers (Kurds and Shia).
Well, Washington learned its lesson. Faced with another thug regime that's no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders which it kills in large numbers (African Muslims and southern Christians), the unilateralist cowboy decided to go by the book. No unlawful actions here. Instead, meetings at the UN. Consultations with allies. Possible referral to the Security Council.
And as I wrote on this page in July 2004: "The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead." And as I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph in September 2004: "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped."
But that is the M.O. os the UN: Pay now, dawdle forever. Unfortunately in the world we live in, dawdling, dithering, and generally wasting time costs not only lives right now, but more money in the long run.
Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a "stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur".
Agreed. So let's get on to the details. If by "multinational" Clooney means a military intervention authorised by the UN, then he's a poseur and a fraud, and we should pay him no further heed.
Meaningful UN action is never gonna happen. Sudan has at least two Security Council vetoes in its pocket: China gets 6 per cent of its oil from the country, while Russia has less obviously commercial reasons and more of a general philosophical belief in the right of sovereign states to butcher their own.
So forget a legal intervention authorised by the UN. If by "multinational" Clooney means military participation by the Sudanese regime's co-religionists, then dream on. The Arab League, as is its wont when one of its bloodier members gets a bad press, has circled the camels and chosen to confer its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on Khartoum by holding its most recent summit there.
That and a strongly worded letter will earn you a pat on the back by Kooky Uncle Kofi, of which I am sure Clooney has had his share of. I know Angelina has.
So who, in the end, does "multinational action" boil down to? The same small group of nations responsible for almost any meaningful global action, from Sierra Leone to Iraq to Afghanistan to the tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia and on to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The same core of English-speaking countries, technically multinational but distressingly unicultural and unilingual and indeed, given that most of them share the same head of state, uniregal. The US, Britain, Australia and Canada (back in the game in Afghanistan) certainly attract other partners, from the gallant Poles to the Kingdom of Tonga.
But, whatever international law has to say on the subject, the only effective intervention around the world comes from ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by the doughty musketeers of the Anglosphere. Right now who's on the ground dragging the reluctant Sudanese through their negotiations with the African Union? America's Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn. Sorry, George, that's as "multinational" as it's gonna get.
Which is, perhaps, the saddest part of the tale. when nations like China, like Russia, and like those brutal Arab regimes and Islamofascist nations (like Iran) see what is occurring in Sudan, they silently clap their hands. At least, they are thinking, someone is doing something about the riff-raff in their own nations. Like Mark said, Russia is willing to stand by because it believes in the sovereign right of a nation to butcher its people. America, Australia, Canada, and Great Britain represents the only willing nations left--with appropriate military force--to give a rat's @$$ about the death of innocent people. But as caring goes, what do we expect from a workd that seems to have lost it's collective mind in recent years.
Clooney made an interesting point a few weeks ago. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word in America and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. But you're never going to do so as long as your squeamishness about the projection of American power outweighs your do-gooder instincts.
Liberal will continue to be a bad word in the lexicon of American politics as long as that does not change. And if Clooney would like to take a look art the party he supports, there are plenty of House candidate moonbats that are running on two issues: The impeachment of the president, and the "redeployment" of our troops OUT of Iraq. It is called retreat. It is called defeat. And it is called partisanship. All three things culminate into precisely why the word liberal is such a dirty word to the liberals right now.
The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does?He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff such as: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."
Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.
Whew! What a relief to the people of Darfur as they dig those deep graves (mass graves anyone?) that they are not being systematically wiped out. It would be so much easier if the government of Sudan asked Iran for enough radioactive material, laid it out for the civilians, and allowed the radiation to do its job. Some might even call that more humane than what is occurring now. As a matter of fact, they might even get Clooney to go along with it. He is, after all, a self-described humanitarian.
Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.
What's the quintessential leftist cause? It's the one you see on a gazillion bumper stickers: Free Tibet. Every college in the US has a Free Tibet society: There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan Chapter. Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. Idealism asinertia is the hallmark of the movement.
Too true. Too true. Those in favor of some of these far-flung nations going through absolute Hell would prefer to give them lip service, or guilt Americans into feeling bad for where they are in life. Life in Sudan is no picnic, to be sure. And damn us for not caring enough, or not sending enough money to the UN through its myriad of "humanitarian" agencies like UNICEF. Damn us for not saying "we are sorry." Damn us for not stating at every turn, during every waking moment that "we care" about Tibet, Sudan, and a host of hellholes around the world where innocent people are killed everyday. But whatever you do, do not be serious about ending the problem. The Left loves to point out problems, but they are not ones to come up with a solution. OR their solution is much like the Oil-For-Fraud program where we send them the money, and they expect no accountability for said money.
Those of us on the Free Iraq-Free Darfur side are consistent: There are no bad reasons to clobber thug regimes, and the postmodern sovereignty beloved by the UN is strictly conditional. At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism. As Alexander Downer put it: "Outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism."
Just so. Regrettably, the Australian Foreign Minister isn't as big a star as Clooney, but I'm sure Downer wouldn't mind if Clooney wanted to appropriate it as the Clooney Doctrine. If Anglosphere action isn't multinational enough for Sudan, it might confirm the suspicion that the Left's conscience is now just some tedious shell game in which it frantically scrambles the thimbles but, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.
The point of this is simple. It is commendable that Clooney and his looney associates in Holly-weird "care" about certain things. But I have a newsflash for him, and I am positive this will come as a shock to him.
We all care, George. But the difference between our caring and his caring is that his is quite simply lip service. We would love to go in, and deal with that regime. But this time around, as Mark eloquently put it "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped." We made the mistake this time around, and it will be Rwanda all over again.
We, the clear thinking common sense Americans, do care about the murder going on over there. And we would support intervention. But it is glaringly apparent that we have an administration that opts for unilateralism one day, and UN-led multilateralism the next. The UN, as many I am sure suspect, is DOA now. They are the epitome of bureaucratic snafus that rival even the most inept world leader (though I hear that Jacques Chirac is gaining on them). It is an organization that cares little of the world, despite their charter, and who feel that the world should bow to them; defer to them in any sort of "emergency" (including bilking good nations of money when they need to line their pockets) whether it involves sovereignty or not.
No, Georgie-boy can keep fretting about Sudan. The UN is not going to do anything about it, and it is powerless to force the UNSC to take action. The only intervention is going to come from good nations acting unilaterally. Right now, that is not going to happen. The UN said it themselves: There is no genocide. And while I am sure that is a welcome relief to them, it does not ease the burden of the peopleof Sudan dying in the streets from an oppressive regime that needs to have the worst beat-down of it's infinitessimal lives.
The Bunny ;)
You have to love Mark Steyn when he is on target. (To date, I am unaware of when he has ever been off target on any serious issue.) Today is no exception. People like George "Looney" Clooney think that we need to have a strong multinational force to protect the civilians in Darfur. I agree. There is slaughter going on in Darfur that is reminiscent of Rwanda and Zimbabwe. But, as Mark points out, if Clooney is talking about the United Nations, then he is a bigger fool than what we credit him to be.
I SEE George Clooney and Angelina Jolie have discovered Darfur and are now demanding "action". Good for them. Hollywood hasn't shown this much interest in indigenous groups of the Sudan since John Payne and Jerry Colonna sang The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish in Garden of the Moon (1938).
I wish the celebs well. Those of us who wanted action on Darfur years ago will hope their advocacy produces more results than ours did. Clooney's concern for the people of the region appears to be genuine and serious. But unless he's also serious about backing the only forces in the world with the capability and will to act in Sudan, he's just another showboating pretty boy of no use to anyone.
Here's the lesson of the past three years: The UN kills.
Maybe Clooney will recall the numerous scandals that have plagued the UN over the past few years. The food-for-sex scandal in the Congo where UN peacekeepers stole the innocence of girls barely above ten years old just so those girls could take some food home to their families. And Mark talked about that here; he highlighted "Kofi's Dollar Girls." And then there is the Oil-For-Fraud scandal where we shoveled billions down a bottomless rat-hole, and into the pockets of a brutal dictator (which we had to go and deal with in 2003) and those higher-ups in the UN. Oh yeah. The UN's a good starting point. NOT!
In 2003, you'll recall, the US was reviled as a unilateralist cowboy because it and its coalition of the poodles waged an illegal war unauthorised by the UN against a sovereign state run by a thug regime that was no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders, which it killed in large numbers (Kurds and Shia).
Well, Washington learned its lesson. Faced with another thug regime that's no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders which it kills in large numbers (African Muslims and southern Christians), the unilateralist cowboy decided to go by the book. No unlawful actions here. Instead, meetings at the UN. Consultations with allies. Possible referral to the Security Council.
And as I wrote on this page in July 2004: "The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead." And as I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph in September 2004: "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped."
But that is the M.O. os the UN: Pay now, dawdle forever. Unfortunately in the world we live in, dawdling, dithering, and generally wasting time costs not only lives right now, but more money in the long run.
Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a "stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur".
Agreed. So let's get on to the details. If by "multinational" Clooney means a military intervention authorised by the UN, then he's a poseur and a fraud, and we should pay him no further heed.
Meaningful UN action is never gonna happen. Sudan has at least two Security Council vetoes in its pocket: China gets 6 per cent of its oil from the country, while Russia has less obviously commercial reasons and more of a general philosophical belief in the right of sovereign states to butcher their own.
So forget a legal intervention authorised by the UN. If by "multinational" Clooney means military participation by the Sudanese regime's co-religionists, then dream on. The Arab League, as is its wont when one of its bloodier members gets a bad press, has circled the camels and chosen to confer its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on Khartoum by holding its most recent summit there.
That and a strongly worded letter will earn you a pat on the back by Kooky Uncle Kofi, of which I am sure Clooney has had his share of. I know Angelina has.
So who, in the end, does "multinational action" boil down to? The same small group of nations responsible for almost any meaningful global action, from Sierra Leone to Iraq to Afghanistan to the tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia and on to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The same core of English-speaking countries, technically multinational but distressingly unicultural and unilingual and indeed, given that most of them share the same head of state, uniregal. The US, Britain, Australia and Canada (back in the game in Afghanistan) certainly attract other partners, from the gallant Poles to the Kingdom of Tonga.
But, whatever international law has to say on the subject, the only effective intervention around the world comes from ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by the doughty musketeers of the Anglosphere. Right now who's on the ground dragging the reluctant Sudanese through their negotiations with the African Union? America's Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn. Sorry, George, that's as "multinational" as it's gonna get.
Which is, perhaps, the saddest part of the tale. when nations like China, like Russia, and like those brutal Arab regimes and Islamofascist nations (like Iran) see what is occurring in Sudan, they silently clap their hands. At least, they are thinking, someone is doing something about the riff-raff in their own nations. Like Mark said, Russia is willing to stand by because it believes in the sovereign right of a nation to butcher its people. America, Australia, Canada, and Great Britain represents the only willing nations left--with appropriate military force--to give a rat's @$$ about the death of innocent people. But as caring goes, what do we expect from a workd that seems to have lost it's collective mind in recent years.
Clooney made an interesting point a few weeks ago. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word in America and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. But you're never going to do so as long as your squeamishness about the projection of American power outweighs your do-gooder instincts.
Liberal will continue to be a bad word in the lexicon of American politics as long as that does not change. And if Clooney would like to take a look art the party he supports, there are plenty of House candidate moonbats that are running on two issues: The impeachment of the president, and the "redeployment" of our troops OUT of Iraq. It is called retreat. It is called defeat. And it is called partisanship. All three things culminate into precisely why the word liberal is such a dirty word to the liberals right now.
The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does?He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff such as: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."
Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.
Whew! What a relief to the people of Darfur as they dig those deep graves (mass graves anyone?) that they are not being systematically wiped out. It would be so much easier if the government of Sudan asked Iran for enough radioactive material, laid it out for the civilians, and allowed the radiation to do its job. Some might even call that more humane than what is occurring now. As a matter of fact, they might even get Clooney to go along with it. He is, after all, a self-described humanitarian.
Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.
What's the quintessential leftist cause? It's the one you see on a gazillion bumper stickers: Free Tibet. Every college in the US has a Free Tibet society: There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan Chapter. Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. Idealism asinertia is the hallmark of the movement.
Too true. Too true. Those in favor of some of these far-flung nations going through absolute Hell would prefer to give them lip service, or guilt Americans into feeling bad for where they are in life. Life in Sudan is no picnic, to be sure. And damn us for not caring enough, or not sending enough money to the UN through its myriad of "humanitarian" agencies like UNICEF. Damn us for not saying "we are sorry." Damn us for not stating at every turn, during every waking moment that "we care" about Tibet, Sudan, and a host of hellholes around the world where innocent people are killed everyday. But whatever you do, do not be serious about ending the problem. The Left loves to point out problems, but they are not ones to come up with a solution. OR their solution is much like the Oil-For-Fraud program where we send them the money, and they expect no accountability for said money.
Those of us on the Free Iraq-Free Darfur side are consistent: There are no bad reasons to clobber thug regimes, and the postmodern sovereignty beloved by the UN is strictly conditional. At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism. As Alexander Downer put it: "Outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism."
Just so. Regrettably, the Australian Foreign Minister isn't as big a star as Clooney, but I'm sure Downer wouldn't mind if Clooney wanted to appropriate it as the Clooney Doctrine. If Anglosphere action isn't multinational enough for Sudan, it might confirm the suspicion that the Left's conscience is now just some tedious shell game in which it frantically scrambles the thimbles but, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.
The point of this is simple. It is commendable that Clooney and his looney associates in Holly-weird "care" about certain things. But I have a newsflash for him, and I am positive this will come as a shock to him.
We all care, George. But the difference between our caring and his caring is that his is quite simply lip service. We would love to go in, and deal with that regime. But this time around, as Mark eloquently put it "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped." We made the mistake this time around, and it will be Rwanda all over again.
We, the clear thinking common sense Americans, do care about the murder going on over there. And we would support intervention. But it is glaringly apparent that we have an administration that opts for unilateralism one day, and UN-led multilateralism the next. The UN, as many I am sure suspect, is DOA now. They are the epitome of bureaucratic snafus that rival even the most inept world leader (though I hear that Jacques Chirac is gaining on them). It is an organization that cares little of the world, despite their charter, and who feel that the world should bow to them; defer to them in any sort of "emergency" (including bilking good nations of money when they need to line their pockets) whether it involves sovereignty or not.
No, Georgie-boy can keep fretting about Sudan. The UN is not going to do anything about it, and it is powerless to force the UNSC to take action. The only intervention is going to come from good nations acting unilaterally. Right now, that is not going to happen. The UN said it themselves: There is no genocide. And while I am sure that is a welcome relief to them, it does not ease the burden of the peopleof Sudan dying in the streets from an oppressive regime that needs to have the worst beat-down of it's infinitessimal lives.
The Bunny ;)
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 12:11 PM
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