Quote Originally Posted by wm View Post
I believe that we could summarize this whole post as "Let folks apply the principle of self-determination." Western paternalistic attempts to help out the world's "poor and downtrodden," inspired IMHO by a distorted form of missionary zeal that is really a poor attempt to assuage guilt over abuse of power, have proven themselves to be ineffective and quite often downright destructive to those "poor and downtrodden" people.
Funny that you say that as Gerard Prunier essentially says the same. I just got my Amazon notification that his book on the Congo Wars was shipped.

I do believe that there are circumstances where intervention are not only justified but obligatory. Rwanda's genocide was such a case. In contrast, the Humanitarian Crisis" as hyped in Somalia that led us to go in there was a mistake. Errors made in that crisis forestalled effective intervention in Rwanda. I do not believe that there is a cookie cutter model out there that can be used to select such instances. All are different and all require measured analysis. Just because 2 crises both happen in Africa do not make them the same.

CNN's Christine Amanpour's special on genocide ran last night and I watched some of it. Dallaire's comments about he could have done something with a brigade were again front and center in pre-show articles on CNN.com. Maybe he could have--if he actually had a brigade of Canadian troops or US troops or troops with a non-UN C2 system (UN C2 means no command and very little control). The UN has a division worth of troops in Congo right now and they have been there for years. What a waste.

Tom