The Darfur
The world, as Tom Friedman coined, is flat. No doubt about that. Globalization runs away with itself and leaves us intelligent primates in a disordered hubbub of "Wha- Ha?" as we cling to the tether that drags us behind it. Bouncing along we are allowed brief glimpses of "events" taking place among the zig zagging avenue of geo-economic machinery. The seemingly neverending Palestinian/Israeli conflict, India and Pakistans bloody squabbles over Kashmir, Nork missiles sailing east over Japan, Ethiopia's fractious discourse with Eritrea, Cubas "stateman" looking death in the eyes, a return to Soviet cloak and daggery in the death of Litvinenko, on and on these events blur by. And on and on, American leaders grasp them, understand or fail to understand them and react to them. In most cases of global conflict I'm quite happy to allow the principles to run their course. Personally, should India and Pakistan have at it over Kashmir, I'm in line with the European approach. Talk a lot, wave madly and denounce anything that offends sensative longhaired men with glasses, dirty fingernails and a closet full of t-shirts emblazened with the stoicly bereted image of Che Guaverra. In otherwords I play the "who fucking well cares" card to a degree and then backfill the apathy with a great deal of official discourse. Lots of nodding, earlobe tugging and chin cupping. Because, rightly, most fractious events that take place around the globe are both; none of Americas business and no iminent threat to American interests.
However, once in a great while there arises a case that niether maintains an effect on American security nor will it disrupt my cable television. And yet I yearn for American inteference. I entertain satisfying visions of surgically precise, visciously finned guided bombs obliterating stately mansions in a brilliant orange flash and much shouting of "What the fuck was that?!"
Such a case resides in the western Sudanese province of Darfur where 400,000 people have been erased at the behest of an Arab fascist, a 3rd gen. military and a 4th gen. guerilla group commonly referred to as the janjaweed. This is not some territorial dispute or religious discrepancy rather a clear case of a regime scything down an entire race of people that had the audacity to maintain millenia of presence in a region that, suddenly, won't tolerate either their racial difference nor their agricultural proclivities.
Sucking up vast acerage for farming (and maintaining) earth was apparently too much for the nomadic arab herdsman. Livestock driven blight is a much more prosperous and acceptable ways of means in ones maintnence of life, apparently. That there exist people who live otherwise is apparently too much. They must be eliminated.
As such, I'm full well willing to completely divide my normal "realist" tendency and embrace the "idealist" that lurks in my mind somewhere behind the memory crates of my 10th grade spanish teachers cleavage and those that imprison the small brush fire I started in my 13th summer. My solution? It sounds simple, perhaps too simple but: An ultimatum levied at al Bashir. A cessation of carnage or the cessation of you. Back it up with a guided missile and the subsequent obliteration of his unpccupied car, perhaps. Make it clear. It stops or you stop. And fuck the Chinese. They'll get over it.
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