They are just no relevant, are they ? And when they are, they too are "our fault", the Iraq sanction being a brilliant example.
Play the ball, not the man.
It is not incorrect. Nor have you shown yourself to know more "facts" than anyone else.
News are not impartial. Least of all do they care about human lives. In best case they care about sensation, in worst case about political agenda.
Sudan slaughtering parts of their own population is no sensation, and least of all is it part of the medias prefered political agenda, as it shows, that cruelty and murder is universal, not culturally premeditated.
I am not talking about goverments, so no we don't agree.
I am talking about media, about intellectuals and about the whole public opinion. People don't give a brick, unless the executioners are their own political opposition.
That violence, suffering and cruelty existed before the West, despite the West, even inside the West and will go on beyond the West as long as man lives.
Thus the argument is not whether people were killed in Iraq or whether that was wrong. It was. It always is. It's more about whether the alternative was better or whether things could have and should been done differently.
What do you think ? How do you deal with well armed genocidals, who will not step back and who will not cooperate ? Intervention or no intervention. There's no inbetween. What do we do ?
How are they not relevant? I mentioned them and said that Saddam was the sickest of dictators in an area rife with sick dictators. But the solution to killing is not more killing. Whether it is the West, Russia, China, the Arabs, Israelis, Turks, whatever, I don't care. The solution to violence is rarely violence.
The Iraq Sanctions were designed to weaken Saddam's grip on Iraq. Tell me how that worked out. Then tell me how many Iraqis, especially children, died from the sanctions. Look at Amnesty or UNICEF's reports. I have no problem with sanctions which incisively strike at a government's ability to hold onto power. The Iraq sanctions were a total embargo and had wide-reaching effects on the population themselves. That is known as collective punishment.
Yes it is incorrect. My wife is Egyptian, I have a proficiency in Arabic, I have Iraqi friends who are spending increasing amounts of time in Iraq. There is frequent violence still in Iraq which is rarely reported in Western media. Not because of any kind of bias or malevolent intentions but simply because its not interesting any longer, unless large numbers o Iraqis die, or NATO servicemen and women.
And you've said it perfectly there. News care about sensation. They want the images of a burning car, the news of dozens of deaths. After a while, people become immune and people become bored. They're not going to want to read about a car bomb which killed one person in a Baghdad marketplace.
So you're honestly saying that the media has an interest in showing that media's preferred agenda is showing that cruelty and murder are solely or mainly Western traits?
Peoples' opinions are shaped by their governments, by their cultures, by their media. And its again incorrect to state such an opinion as fact. Look at the Biafra secession civil war as an example. Little Western involvement or feeling for either side so no-one could take a side based on wanting to get one over on the West. Yet there was a huge humanitarian air mission, the biggest ever non-military one. People certainly gave a brick based on just pictures and stories. Nothing about the evil white man or our enemy. Just wanting to help.
Really? Can you link me to a person who has said that violence, suffering and cruelty exists solely because of the West? Because even the most airy-fairy intellectuals tend to stay away from such grandiose statements.
I'll put it this way. We talk about the West because that is currently the world's dominant culture and the world's dominant military bloc. In the cold war, we talked of the US and the USSR. In 30 years, we may talk of China, India or Brazil. Please don't take criticisms of the Western military machine as a personal insult.
The West rarely intervenes militarily unless it serves its own personal interests. That may be to prop up an ally, remove an enemy, maintain trade routes or control natural resources. This is not a trait unique to the West. The USSR did the same crap, all other superpowers in history have done so and all forthcoming superpowers will likely do so too. So the label we have ascribed ourselves as the global police is laughable. Either we always intervene (taking the context into account of course) or we never intervene. You mention what you think of Denmark's labour leader hypocrisy. Which is an excellent point, I hate hypocrisy. Yet you then show hypocrisy in the field of Western interventionism.
For Iraq, the Arabs were so eager to take Saddam out of Kuwait, let them deal with their regional issues. If they cannot, then maybe it is time for external intervention. The sanctions were horrific and had no effect on Saddam's ability to keep hold of power, only punishing his population. And the 2nd gulf war and the subsequent civil war, considering that this ended up killing more people than Saddam did over his 20+ years in power was bad. That's a pretty easy conclusion.
