I am answering Marino’s response in parts to avoid making a run-on post even longer.
Africa first: says the memes of these societies are profoundly distasteful and self-destructive. Let us examine the alternatives:
1. Seal the place and leave it to die – this would be my choice. We can make exceptions for the oil wells and the resorts in Kenya. Beyond that, no aid [not even humanitarian]. No movement of people, using deadly force if necessary to keep the dieing hundreds of millions from seeking life by running away from their dysfunctional states and societies. Trade only from First World controlled enclave ports after careful examination of every parcel for contraband and disease. Commando raids to break up jihadi bases and anything that threatens the oil or resorts. Essentially treat the area the way the US and Mexicans treated the Amerinds of the Southwest [Northwest if you are a Mexican] except without the possibility of surrender or acculturation. I could stomach this. Aren’t we all glad I am in charge of nothing. We are talking about the death sentence for illegal migrants while we jail people who try to smuggle food and medicine to the dieing. It would solve the problem. It would pass the gag reflex of 95% of the First World once the pictures hit the media and there would be pictures.
2. Bring back colonialism. Let the First World run the various places while retraining the natives to be productive citizens. If HTG were dealing with this blog he would be foaming at this point. Tell the benighted Darkies that someday their grandchildren may be fit to be real human beings but meantime Massah is back in charge. This won’t fly. It would revolt many. The others won’t pay the costs of doing so including the domestic costs of the revolted expressing their dissent. Empire in Africa died because the European publics weren’t willing to forgo any level of consumption or social benefit to sustain it. Ours came to the same conclusion as regards the Caribbean in the 30’s. We put that aside a bit for the Cold War [WW3] but lost all interest as soon as that war ended. We dumped our more unruly clients as fast as we could. One of our Shrub’s election planks was no more Clintonian nation building. The Shrub’s rhetoric has changed. His actions in Afghanistan and Iraq have not. Now I am not saying that there aren’t places in Africa that wouldn’t benefit from a century of liberal imperialism [most of West Africa and the greater Congo for starters] but this is SO clearly a nonstarter.
3. What we actually do – mostly ignore the mess because ALL the choices disgust us so much. When the slaughter or starvation gets too bad, we do a spot of humanitarian work. Often as not [east Congo after the Rwandan genocide] we just make matters worse. There are a few scandals of white soldiers beating / shooting local thieves, firing into angry crowds that include armed men firing on them, mistreating local whores. These stories cancel out the pictures of starving children and slaughtered refugee corpses. The public gets disgusted. The troops go home until next time. Now Ethiopia is one of the EASY cases. Whatever else the faults of Ethiopia / Eritrea, the local Big Men can at least provide armed security for the NGO’s to work. So the NGO’s [plus a few PMC’s to provide security] can ‘do good’ in relative safety while coming up with footage that will sell well for their fundraising in their First World homelands. The Francophone NGO’s will squabble with the Anglophone ones. All the European ones will condemn the US ones. Even the US ones will agree that whatever is happening is totally the fault of the USG. They will then publicly wonder why each US President is ever less willing to get involved. The core US donor base for these NGO’s is to the world government internationalist left of anyone who will get into the White House in my remaining lifetime. Even Clinton refused to waste his political capital on Rwanda. And in US domestic terms he was right. The only way to be for majority rule and minority protection against genocide in Rwanda required not a peacekeeping force but rather a peacemaking force. We would have had to do regime change and then stay there until the memes in the populace changed, however many decades that took. We would have had to suppress the Hutu militants with deadly force. We would have had to remove both democracy and free media for an indefinite period probably measured in decades. We would have been condemned by the ‘international community’ and the establishment types on both sides of the Atlantic. For Rwanda? Not in a million years. Not if it had been 8 million dead instead of somewhat under one million. For us to take that risk would need either a LOT of oil or a Mexican meltdown.
As to my own former comments here on Africa, I see Africa as a European problem. We have too much on our [the US’s] plate as is. I wouldn’t even feed them when they starve but won’t write letters to my Congresscritters when we do…
posted by scott 10:36 AM