The point I am making is that we were intervening.
I think it was more like procrastination and wishful thinking, rather than ever decisively dealing with the problem (which we weren't in a measure of doing without support of the UN then nor now.) This the usual modus operandi with any of these things, keep them swept out of sight, with some half-way measures, in the hopes the problem will go away by itself.
If the UN wasn't so worthless, something would have been done about a dictatorship like that long ago, but that's not how it works.
By the way, I don't think any of the comparisons bandied about (Vietnam, Algeria, etc) are pertinent. Algeria might seem to be a close fit, but in reality the world really didn't care what happened there. Was there ever any news analysis of the situation here in the US while the civil war was raging, and a good order of magnitude or more people were killed in the process than has happened or will happen in Iraq ? Now, all eyes are on Iraq, and it's a far more strategic country than Algeria since a stable oil supply is a real concern. Vietnam was this proxy cold war battle, and not related concretely to supply of something so crucial to the civilized world. |
