I will have a full-fledged Congo update tomorrow, but for now, try Gary Farber’s experiment:
Substitute the word “Jews” for “Lendu” or “Hema.”
Then say, gee, gosh, it would cost a lot to save them.
Tough luck if millions die, because it’s expensive, it’s awkward, it’s tough, to save them.
Bye, bye, Jews. Too bad. It’s expensive to save them. It’s expensive to save you black people, you Hema, you Lendu. It’s tough to keep track of your names, even. Even your clan, your tribe, your people.
Bye-bye. Die in peace. Die by the thousands. Die by the tens of thousands. Die by the hundreds of thousands. Die by the millions. I have fast food. Bye-bye. I don’t need to go to trouble. Bye-bye. Die well. Bye-bye. My conscience is untroubled. I could have saved you for a few days of work, but I don’t want to be troubled. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Why don’t these people matter?
Barney Gumble
They’re not in the Bible?
Courtney
What do we do? My conscience is troubled, but wtf are we supposed to do about it?
Dougalsdomain
The US helps all countries that allow corporate colonization and control of resources. Tell these people the rules and if they play ball then we’ll be right over.
Dean
Realistically?
1. They’re not in the public eye. Why Somalia and not Rwanda? Why Haiti and not Sudan? Because Somalia and Haiti have had lots more press coverage. If it doesn’t happen in front of CNN, it just isn’t considered that important.
2. They’re not in an area of vital national interest, by just about anyone’s definition. Congo’s resources simply aren’t that great, especially with the end of the Cold War. And before anyone says “It’s about the oooiiiilllll!” keep in mind that we’ve had huge disasters in Nigeria, which is one of the world’s larger oil producers, and nobody’s suggested going in there, either (except for some members of teh Congressional Black Caucus, who, I trust, are NOT doing it for the oooiiillllll).
3. Absence of contingency planning. I’ve said this before in other comments here. The US military has minimal plans for intervening ANYWHERE south of the Equator. And given the way we fight wars, no logistics plan is tantamount to no plan to intervene in less than a year.
4. Unfamiliarity. All of these are linked, in turn, to the reality that few Americans know much about Africa. And what we do “know,” is often quite inaccurate, or colored by previous events (Mogadishu being prominent among them). The idea of intervening, on behalf of people we don’t know, who have little voice or visibility, but who the one time we DID try to help, wound up killing a buncha US troops, is hardly a winning message. If this is inaccurate, it requires so much energy getting the facts right (e.g., it wasn’t THESE folks who killed our boys in Mog) that you’ve lost the bubble once you’ve started.
And it’s not like anyone else is lining up to intervene, either (hence my previous suggestion of the UN hiring mercenaries, which might at least ameliorate the situation).
realistic
(reposted from the Yglesias thread dealing with this)
There are people killing each other all over the world. We do not have the resources to interfere in each of those conflicts – we intervene if and when it serves US security interests.
Concerning Africa, particularly Congo:
It really is too bad that people are dying there. Yet if we committed troops, we would be fighting nine nations simultaneously in a morally ambiguous war for no clear purpose. Who are we going to back? We’d have to fight all sides to a standstill, projecting power into the middle of a landlocked country. We would have to fight child warriors with AK-47’s. No matter what happened, accusations of racism would fly fast and furious from the left, because pacification would require killing a lot of black people. And criticism for the needless deaths of American soldiers would come from the right. We would have to become a colonial power, with all that entails, with possible occupations and pacifications of multiple African countries. And when we withdrew, the killing would start all over again.
Does that sound like a good idea? Deaths are tragic, but this is a civil war, not a massacre per se . There aren’t any good guys here.
Gary Farber
“Deaths are tragic, but this is a civil war, not a massacre per se . There aren’t any good guys here.”
Bullshit. Most of the people killed are perfectly innocent civilians, killed for the crime of being of the wrong tribe or clan in the wrong place. Several *million* people have been slaughtered in the Congo in the past decade. I am quite sure that, say, the kids under eight years old who have been killed are not “bad guys,” and I have no reason to believe that the overwhelming majority of those killed, let alone those terrorized, are not “good guys.”
Would intervention be difficult? Of course. Would it be needful for many countries, including the US, to be engaged? Surely.
I guess that’s reason enough to sit comfortably a day’s plane ride away, and let those people die. A shame, but, hey, it’s not like I can spare a few of my tax dollars for this sort of thing. It’s just not *realistic*, is it?
They’re not, after all, *my* relatives, or anyone I know.
Besides, we Americans would be *criticized*. Fortunately, if we do little or nothing, we will, of course, protect ourselves from that deadly rain of “criticism.” Heaven forfend we should endure such torment.
A shame about that Rwanda thing, that Cambodia thing, and that Holocaust thing, too. It’s just not in our security interests to try to interrupt that sort of thing.
Hmm, think I’ll go play a nice computer game now, to get my mind off these depressing topics I feel unwilling to see my money spent on. I’m sure I couldn’t afford it. It might cost me as much as a USB cable, or something equally precious.
Dean
Gary,
I understand the frustration that you feel, and agree that many, many of the people who have been killed did nothing to “deserve” their fate.
Sadly, that’s not the point.
Did the Tutsis “deserve” being slaughtered by the Hutu? Of course not. But it’s not as though, when the tables were turned, the Tutsis simply reconciled with their neighbors. The Tutsi armies that eventually conquered Rwanda were very, very effective (and did not engage in atrocities on anywhere near the scale of the Hutus). But the result was (and remains) a civil war, w/ the Tutsi armies now fighting in Congo/Zaire, against forces that backed (and still back) Hutu die-hards.
The conceptual 8-year old is innocent. But the 18 year old may or may not take up arms, the minute we leave. He may or may not have committed atrocities himself.
As liberals would say, you have to look at the “root causes.” Which, in this case, is not necessarily an argument against acting, but IS a warning that simply assuming that some people are “good” or “bad” is as likely to ensnare you as it is to provide a solution.
And while it’s easy to say that it’s a “day’s flight away,” the force that you so rightly decry of 1200 troops is probably about what you could support in a non-benign environment, by air, for any length of time. A mechanized force with helicopters (which are logistical nightmares, under the BEST of circumstances)? I hope YOU’ve got a year’s worth of logistical planning under your belt for this, but I don’t believe ANY military worth its salt in the Western world does.
Is it comfortable to let them die? No, it’s not. But there ARE limits to what you can do, physical, real limits, if you’re intending to make a difference, and not simply pour a few hundred or thousand men into a cauldron so that you can say you did “something”.