Obama Reality - A Pretty good assessment

[DavyR]

A little harsh maybe, but most of the quotes are smoke clouds, nothing solid, didn't mean to upset Emma.

 

I'm sure the only thing upsetting her is your refusal to play nicely and say whether you have any hard facts to back up your opinions.

 

Otherwise it sounds like Emma's case = smoke clouds, Ken's case = Incontrovertible evidence.

[Ken Davison South Wales]

'Glib' =Showing little thought, preparation, or concern, now have a think about the definition! (Its best not to use words which you don't really understand the meaning of) and do an honest appraisal of which of us it most accurately describes.

 

I have cited sources to support my argument, as Davy has already pointed out 'that's the name of the game', how debates are properly conducted, if you want to challenge what I say you find sources to counter my case not just waffle about what 'you' think.

 

What do you want a straight answer to?

 

I have pointed out in my own words the holes in your argument, accusing Bush and Blair of going against advise is totally untrue. Anyone with half a brain would realise that President's and Prime Minister's are no more than chairman.

 

I was never a fan of Bush but at the end of the day his policies were formed by advisor's and most of them highly respected.

 

Blair made one mistake he hung his hat on one rusty nail instead of several more substantial nails and in all fairness I did not see to many objections at the time. He pushed the weapons of mass destruction to the limit in order to get support where as there were a number of other facets which were equally important such as the wholesale destruction of Saddam's own people, I believe the term is genocide.

 

Are you stating that we should have walked away from that situation?

 

Sanctions were not working, again he was depriving the country in order to feather his own nest, hospitals etc were under funded and people suffering.

 

I have lived and worked there, I know the terrain, looking for a hundred scuds would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. He had equipment to build tunnels to hide the equipment, he purchased it of contractors building bunkers and arms reserve depots. Those were easy to locate because we built them so it would have made sense to have created alternatives. The problem with scuds is the setting up time which made them easy to find as he found out in the first war. To be quite honest he came within a hairs breath of being blown out of existence then if the USA had not exerted pressure on Israel.

 

Don't get me wrong, no war is acceptable, they all sit very uneasy on the minds of the worlds peace loving people, unfortunately some are unavoidable; Iraq and Afghanistan fell into that category. It is not a nice world and I fear I have lost a lot of freinds I made in the Middle East during the thirty years I spent there.

[DavyR]

equally important such as the wholesale destruction of Saddam's own people, I believe the term is genocide.

 

Any ideas as to why we didn't intervene in the genocide taking place in Rwanda in 1994?

[Ken Davison South Wales]

Any ideas as to why we didn't intervene in the genocide taking place in Rwanda in 1994?

 

Taking a leaf out of Emma's book I quote

 

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's Tutsis by Hutu militia. Over the course of approximately 100 days, from the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimana on April 6th through to mid July, at least 500,000 people were killed.[1] Most estimates indicate a death toll between 800,000 and 1,000,000.[2]

 

France had the major shout on this one as I remember.

 

The genocide was perpetrated by two Hutu militias, the Interahamwe, the militant wing of the MRND, and the Impuzamugambi, the militant wing of the CDR on one side, and the Tutsi rebel group, the RPF, on the other side. The Rwandan Civil War, fought between the Hutu regime with support from Francophone nations of Africa, as well as France itself, and rebel Tutsi exiles with support from Uganda, after their invasion in 1990, was its catalyst. With outside pressure on the Habyarimana's government, in 1993, the Hutu regime and Tutsi rebels agreed to a cease-fire, and the preliminary implementation of the Arusha Accords. The diplomatic efforts to end the conflict were at first thought to be successful, yet even with the RPF, the political wing of the RPA, and the government in talks, elites among the Akazu were against any agreement for cooperation between the regime and the rebels to solve the ethnic and economic problems of Rwanda and progress towards a stable nationhood

 

A resurgence in the civil war compounded the genocide. The situation proved too difficult and volatile for the United Nations to handle. The invaders successfully brought the country under their sway, although their efforts towards a conclusion to the conflict were brought to a contravention after the French, under Operation Turquoise, established and maintained a "safe zone" for Hutu refugees to flee to in the southwest. Eventually, after the UN Mandate of the French mission was at an end, millions of refugees left Rwanda, mainly headed to Zaire. The presence of Hutu refugees (see Great Lakes refugee crisis) on the border with Rwanda was the cause for the First and Second Congo Wars with clashes between these groups and the Rwandan government continuing.[1]

 

 

 

By the time news got out that things had gone pear shape four or five weeks had passed, then we would have had to have tried to obtain all the required UN agreements, by then the sad outcome was in place.

 

As I remember other African states wanted to resolve the matter and we financed that action via the UN.

 

So I would attribute it to France being the major player, UN pondering, African states wanting to handle the matter themselves and the time factor. All in all a major cock up, but as I keep saying the world is far from perfect.

 

I would also state that we were some what late going into Iraq due to the UN wanting to apply sanctions which failed miserably.

 

The Middle East is my pet subject, I lived there, worked there and broke bread with many friends there. My adopted name enabled me to go many place my blood line would have forbidden, I lived with the arguments from both sides of the fence, so I consider myself to have an excellent grass roots understanding of what is going on and please believe me oil has very little to do with it. Take oil out of the equation and there would still be a lot of major problems.

[five bellies]

Any ideas as to why we didn't intervene in the genocide taking place in Rwanda in 1994?

 

I have copied this from the On line Atlantic

 

and It would seem that the article does support some of what Ken has said as far as the power advisers weald in on world leaders,

 

One of the things That stands out is the aviodance of useing the term Genocide, the moment it is used it would seem the world is duty bound to Act.

 

Dafore is a re run of the same senario being played out in recent history and to an extent as we speak.

 

 

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

 

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands.

 

Why did the United States not do more for the Rwandans at the time of the killings? Did the President really not know about the genocide, as his marginalia suggested? Who were the people in his Administration who made the life-and-death decisions that dictated U.S. policy? Why did they decide (or decide not to decide) as they did? Were any voices inside or outside the U.S. government demanding that the United States do more? If so, why weren't they heeded? And most crucial, what could the United States have done to save lives?

 

So far people have explained the U.S. failure to respond to the Rwandan genocide by claiming that the United States didn't know what was happening, that it knew but didn't care, or that regardless of what it knew there was nothing useful to be done. The account that follows is based on a three-year investigation involving sixty interviews with senior, mid-level, and junior State Department, Defense Department, and National Security Council officials who helped to shape or inform U.S. policy. It also reflects dozens of interviews with Rwandan, European, and United Nations officials and with peacekeepers, journalists, and nongovernmental workers in Rwanda. Thanks to the National Security Archive (www.nsarchive.org), a nonprofit organization that uses the Freedom of Information Act to secure the release of classified U.S. documents, this account also draws on hundreds of pages of newly available government records. This material provides a clearer picture than was previously possible of the interplay among people, motives, and events. It reveals that the U.S. government knew enough about the genocide early on to save lives, but passed up countless opportunities to intervene.

 

In March of 1998, on a visit to Rwanda, President Clinton issued what would later be known as the "Clinton apology," which was actually a carefully hedged acknowledgment. He spoke to the crowd assembled on the tarmac at Kigali Airport: "We come here today partly in recognition of the fact that we in the United States and the world community did not do as much as we could have and should have done to try to limit what occurred" in Rwanda.

 

This implied that the United States had done a good deal but not quite enough. In reality the United States did much more than fail to send troops. It led a successful effort to remove most of the UN peacekeepers who were already in Rwanda. It aggressively worked to block the subsequent authorization of UN reinforcements. It refused to use its technology to jam radio broadcasts that were a crucial instrument in the coordination and perpetuation of the genocide. And even as, on average, 8,000 Rwandans were being butchered each day, U.S. officials shunned the term "genocide," for fear of being obliged to act. The United States in fact did virtually nothing "to try to limit what occurred." Indeed, staying out of Rwanda was an explicit U.S. policy objective.

 

With the grace of one grown practiced at public remorse, the President gripped the lectern with both hands and looked across the dais at the Rwandan officials and survivors who surrounded him. Making eye contact and shaking his head, he explained, "It may seem strange to you here, especially the many of you who lost members of your family, but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate [pause] the depth [pause] and the speed [pause] with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

 

Clinton chose his words with characteristic care. It was true that although top U.S. officials could not help knowing the basic facts—thousands of Rwandans were dying every day—that were being reported in the morning papers, many did not "fully appreciate" the meaning. In the first three weeks of the genocide the most influential American policymakers portrayed (and, they insist, perceived) the deaths not as atrocities or the components and symptoms of genocide but as wartime "casualties"—the deaths of combatants or those caught between them in a civil war.

 

Yet this formulation avoids the critical issue of whether Clinton and his close advisers might reasonably have been expected to "fully appreciate" the true dimensions and nature of the massacres. During the first three days of the killings U.S. diplomats in Rwanda reported back to Washington that well-armed extremists were intent on eliminating the Tutsi. And the American press spoke of the door-to-door hunting of unarmed civilians. By the end of the second week informed nongovernmental groups had already begun to call on the Administration to use the term "genocide," causing diplomats and lawyers at the State Department to begin debating the word's applicability soon thereafter. In order not to appreciate that genocide or something close to it was under way, U.S. officials had to ignore public reports and internal intelligence and debate.

 

The story of U.S. policy during the genocide in Rwanda is not a story of willful complicity with evil. U.S. officials did not sit around and conspire to allow genocide to happen. But whatever their convictions about "never again," many of them did sit around, and they most certainly did allow genocide to happen. In examining how and why the United States failed Rwanda, we see that without strong leadership the system will incline toward risk-averse policy choices. We also see that with the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to Rwanda taken off the table early on—and with crises elsewhere in the world unfolding—the slaughter never received the top-level attention it deserved. Domestic political forces that might have pressed for action were absent. And most U.S. officials opposed to American involvement in Rwanda were firmly convinced that they were doing all they could—and, most important, all they should—in light of competing American interests and a highly circumscribed understanding of what was "possible" for the United States to do.

 

One of the most thoughtful analyses of how the American system can remain predicated on the noblest of values while allowing the vilest of crimes was offered in 1971 by a brilliant and earnest young foreign-service officer who had just resigned from the National Security Council to protest the 1970 U.S. invasion of Cambodia. In an article in Foreign Policy, "The Human Reality of Realpolitik," he and a colleague analyzed the process whereby American policymakers with moral sensibilities could have waged a war of such immoral consequence as the one in Vietnam. They wrote,

 

The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. "Nations," "interests," "influence," "prestige"—all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end.

 

Policy analysis excluded discussion of human consequences. "It simply is not done," the authors wrote. "Policy—good, steady policy—is made by the 'tough-minded.' To talk of suffering is to lose 'effectiveness,' almost to lose one's grip. It is seen as a sign that one's 'rational' arguments are weak."

[DavyR]

In 2000, the UN Security Council accepted responsibility for not doing enough to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. Bill Clinton issued an apology. Now it looks as though a similar thing is happening in Congo. I don't quite understand why some genocides appear more worthy of intervention than others.

 

http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/11/14...e-congo-troops/

[five bellies]

In 2000, the UN Security Council accepted responsibility for not doing enough to prevent the genocide in Rwanda. Bill Clinton issued an apology. Now it looks as though a similar thing is happening in Congo. I don't quite understand why some genocides appear more worthy of intervention than others.

 

http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/11/14...e-congo-troops/

 

 

I think I can awnser that! if you Come wrapped in a skin any shade other than pink you don't count! by and large History seems to support this.

 

Im sure Im going to get Corrected.

Edited November 15, 2008 by five bellies

[Ken Davison South Wales]

I think the problem with genocide activities is the fact that the people carrying it out do not want the world to know, so all actions are retrospective.

 

We never stopped the genocide in Iraq but I would like to think we stopped it reoccurring. The Marsh Arabs (The Maʻdān) were a gentle race living out their lives in idyllic conditions at peace with the world. Their only crime was not submitting to Saddam's demands and in return he set about not only destroying them but also the whole eco system in which they lived.

 

I am pleased to say that a large area is once again a flourishing marsh land, but it is still uncertain if the marshes will completely recover, given increased levels of water abstraction from the Tigris and Euphrates.

[Ken Davison South Wales]

I think I can awnser that! if you Come wraped in a skin any shade other than pink you don't count! by and large History seems to support this.

 

Im sure Im going to get Corrected.

 

You bet you are :laugh: A lot of Arabs are extremely dark skinned.

 

During our colonial period we and other countries occupied vast swathes of Africa, a lot of mistakes were made but that is past history, the future was the freedom of African states, control of their own environment. I have only ever made very brief visits to a few places in Africa apart from the northern countries like Egypt, so the vast majority of my knowledge is based upon what I read.

 

Since gaining that freedom a number of the countries have been controlled by some pretty undesirable characters and other areas have suffered from badly drawn lines on the map. But in general terms they do not want us to interfere, they quite rightly want to try and resolve their own problems. But as recent history has proved it is a lot harder to do than to talk about.

 

I would admit apart from one Somali girl friend many many moons ago I have not had the pleasure of a friendly relationship with someone of African origins, so my knowledge of their culture is very limited. I think we only have one customer a gentleman of African origin, a very nice person but only appears a couple of times a year.

 

I think Obama goes a long way to disproving your theory.

[five bellies]

a chap called Wilfred Theissiger wrote a fantastic Book about his life with the marsh Arabs, well worth a read