Carl, we haven't progressed far when a genocidal siege is considered as a response to political disputes.
"Sanctions" against a country, which sounds reasonable, is just a siege by another name. The siege of Japan led directly to Pearl Harbour, though I bet few Americans would realize that there were activities before Pearl Harbour and it wasn't just a surprise attack out of nowhere on a clear blue day, when all was hunky dory.
A siege is a war. When somebody sets a siege on somebody else, they are starting a war on them and had better expect something out of the blue. Because sanctions are fairly benign = no deaths, explosions etc for the most part, they don't make big news. But those suffering the sanctions become aware of them and fester in resentment. It seems surprising when they suddenly erupt "out of the blue".
It's not as though the world can't feed everybody twice over if the political systems are established.
In the bad old days of 10 children per woman, nature dictated that there must be territorial conflict and genocide because the same pig can't be caught and eaten by two people and if one is starving, there will be a dispute over whose pig it is. Now though, the most common pig is the fat pig at the supermarket who lacks self-restraint in the battle with chocolate and other mixtures of sugar, fat, carbohydrates and yummy flavours.
By the way, how dopey is the UN? <The United Nations Baghdad compound was the ultimate soft target. It was highly symbolic and that alone made it vulnerable. Also, its officials eschewed tight military security.> Just as airlines had to learn that aircraft have to be hardened now that they are not luxury liners for the civilized elite and open cockpit doors and "taking them to Havana" aren't good ideas any more, the UN has to harden up and become a serious political and military institution, refusing to be tied up to poles by some local thugs bent on genocide.
I guess that Baghdad Big Bang will be the end of dopey UN "peace-keeping". They need to get with peace-making, which means killing or gaoling those bent on destruction and mayhem and defending against them.
It's Islamic Jihad versus the rest of us. They use guns, knives, bombs, poison, fire, diseases and any other mayhem they can think of.
Fortunately, there are 5 billion of the rest of us and now that the dopey USA has figured out that Gorby wasn't the real enemy and that Islamic Jihad was, and that they backed the wrong horse in Afghanistan in 1980, we should be able to deal with the problem. We have the numbers, the wealth, the military and the technology and have them surrounded.
Islamic Jihad mistakenly thinks that it's Crusades by Christians vs Jihad by Moslems. I've got bad news for them. It's everyone else versus them too. The Christians are relatively few. They should count how many people there are in India, China, Japan, Korea, Russia and all the non-Christians in Europe, then throw in the USA with fleets of Predator drones and they aren't exactly the most popular people on Earth just now.
Blowing up the UN wasn't all that bright.
Mqurice |
