Politics, Sudan, Darfur

A couple of days ago President Bush gave a speech about Sudan. In it he raised sanctions. One of his sound bites was "we will not turn a blind eye to the genocide" happening in the Darfur region. It sounds good. Really, though, it is just a continuation of our standing policy. We don't turn a blind eye to it, we do turn our good eyes away. As far a good, non-made-up intelligence goes, we have more reason to go into the Sudan than we had for going into Iraq. Human rights issues that make Iraq seem like a bad day at Disneyland. Well established connections with terrorist organizations. No WMD, but then, no WMD for Iraq either.
We stood by, averting our healthy eyes, during their civil war. We stand by now as several farming peoples are decimated. We failed to act when it was Christians being killed, we don't act now when it's Islamics. They have horrific human rights violations, but we don't act over horrific human rights violations. They have ties to terrorists, but we don't act over terror connections. We don't seem to act over anything, oh, they don't have oil.

As Americans one of the basic tenets of our political and social beliefs is that government only has power by the consent of the governed. I can pretty much guarantee that tribes being wiped out in the Darfur region aren't consenting. There are governmental and government sponsored human rights attrocities going on right now, as they have been going on for four long, deadly years. We don't have to agree with every other form of government on this planet, and they don't have to agree with ours. But our theory of government self authorizes us to take action when we know something like this is taking place, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks about it. Instead of acting because its right to do so we stand by, shaking our finger. Perhaps its unrelated, but the Darfuri don't effect us economically.