Quote Originally Posted by davidbfpo View Post
Bill,

Touche!

As I said my focus is on the safety of the unarmed civilians caught up in the situation today. Intervention in my day-dreaming would hardly maintain the status quo; rather create - hopefully - a period of less violence, even calm. Then perhaps new relationships, even borders might be reached. From my early reading (cited Post 1) it appeared that CAR already had communal differences, just that the CAR state didn't see them as borders.

All maybe hopelessly optimistic, too many maybe's.
David,

I didn't consider my comment touche or emotional at all, but it was a simple statement with deep meaning. How do we expect Africa to evolve in a way that will eventually result in an acceptable norm for them that is relatively peaceful if we keep intervening to maintain the status quo.

I suspect most of us the West have concerns with unarmed civilians getting killed in any conflict, we definitely killed quite a few ourselves in our recent conflicts and tens of thousands of them during WWII, so is that really a criteria for intervention? Sounds like R2P and the CNN effect all over again, and while not discounting it, since this is principally a conflict between peoples not states, does being unarmed mean you're not a target (to the belligerents)?

I'm not taking a stand one way or the other, I only have a limited familiarity with CAR, but I'm exploring our assumptions for intervention. Short term we may save lives, longer term I'm not so sure.