Darfur

Mkay. So I believe what I'm supposed to be answering in this post is a) who is to blame for the crisis in Darfur? and b) what should the US policy be in regards to Darfur?

That being said, I don't have much to say about the first part. Lots of people are to blame. Some deserve more of the blame than others, but no-one has all of it. I don't think it really matters who's to blame: the fact is, the situation there has gotten to the point where lots of innocent people are dying. Therefore, we need to do something about it instead of sitting around pointing fingers at each other and playing the blame game. It's as simple as that.

What should the US policy be in regards to Darfur? Hmm, I don't know! D'you think maybe we should, I dunno, STEP IN SO THAT MORE INNOCENT PEOPLE DON'T DIE? Hmmmmm...

The US government MUST DO SOMETHING. We cannot allow large-scale killings to occur right under our noses YET AGAIN. Aren't we supposed to be the great and noble America? Defenders of human rights? Isn't the most basic human right the right to be alive? This is our chance to try to redeem ourselves for what happened in Rwanda more than ten years ago. Are we going to take it? If we don't, who will?

The issue certainly isn't that we're not capable of intervening. We certainly are. If we have the troops to invade Iraq, we have the troops to save people in Darfur. The problem is that people in positions of power in this country are lazy and greedy. They don't want to get involved in messy international affairs unless there's something in it for them. Of course, Darfur is a little more complicated than that because of Sudan's relationship with China that has led to China's support of the Sudanese government. Sudan supplies China with oil, so China doesn't want the UN to intervene. America doesn't want to offend China because they do so much of our manufacturing. Which of course is much more important than human lives. Oil and cheap plastic garbage. Yup.

This is ridiculous and disgusting. China needs to take a stand against Sudan. There are other places to get oil, and the world in general needs to get over it's dependence on the stuff anyway. It won't last forever, and it's destroying our planet. But that's a topic for another post. The US needs to stop worrying about the future of our manufacturing in China. Who else would buy that trash from them? Really. They need us as much as we need them.

That being said, we need to do something. It should be obvious to pretty much everyone. One of the reasons that I supported Barack Obama in the last presidential election was that I thought he cared about humanitarian crises like Darfur. However, the longer his administration goes without taking action, the more of my faith in him I lose. Something. Needs. To. Be. Done. And that's it. We can and we have no good reason not to. This is far from a political issue; it's purely a moral one. Has the human race truly come to this?