The pressure on President Bush to get food to the starving Somali people was enormous,
and could be measured, frame by frame, in the recurring pictures of emaciated Somalis,
stomachs paradixically swollen by famine and listless eyes blankly gazing out of
skin-covered skulls, foreshadowing deaths to come. We sent aid, and personnel to
distribute it, and quickly found out that there were warring juntas with bhat-crazed
mercernaries driving "technical vehicles" (jeeps with mounted machine guns) all
demanding a piece of the foreign aid pie. When we attempted to confiscate the weapons
with which these groups were killing both each other and any one else (including the
rest of the Somalis) between them and aggrandizement (including the unarmed aid
workers from whom they were armed-robbing everything that wasn't nailed down) and
stanch the eastward flow of the narcotic bhat from Kenya and Ethiopia, we were
attacked by the juntas for interfering with their drug and extortion rackets,!
!
and when we attempted to capture one of their leaders (Aidid), we felt the wrath of
Osama Bin Ladin, who had smuggled battle-hardened fighters into Mogadishu and set a
trap that ended up with the globally televised spectacle of our dead soldiers being
dragged through the streets by those whom they had been sent to feed. We left them to
their starvation and internecine warfare. The leader was later killed, and his US
educated son assumed his place.
Fast-forward to Rwanda, where the Hutus decided that they didn't want their
neighbor Tutsis around, and began a genocide that eventually cleimed hundreds of
thousands. Horror-stricken, The US and the EEC put pressure on neighboring nations to
militarily intervene and stop the slaughter. Suddenly it was the Hutus who found
themselves fleeing for their lives, as the Tutsis demanded blood revenge for the
attempted tribal genocide. A few thousand of their fighters, upset at the US and the
EEC for intervening to halt their ethnic cleansing, so they decide to hack up
ecotourists visiting a neighboring country, and leave notes on their bodies to insist
on their sovereign right to pursue their killing undisturbed. While this is
happening, the peacekeeping mission in Bosnia is a shining success, so we are trying
to extend it to Kosovo, to stanch the aggression of the Serbs, who have proven
themselves to be the most genocidal european ethnic group since the Third Reich. The
f!
!
act that it is a success, or that it is Moslems whom we are protecting against
Christians, doesn't seem to matter. President Clinton, who engineered these
interventions at the urgent request of the international community, is roundly
criticized at home and abroad for "colonial" and "world policeman" efforts. The US
simply can't win. When we do not intervene, we are labeled heartless isolationists
willing to turn cold shoulders and blind eyes to atrocities. When we do intervene, we
are attacked as foreign occupiers abroad and as global meddlers at home. The bare fact
is, if we don't act to stop these slaughters, there's no one else with both the will
and the capacity to do so, but when we do, it ends up being us who pay the bitter
human, economic and political price for our altruistic humanist efforts.
Joe E. Dees
Poet, Pagan, Philosopher
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