"initial Sudan problems started in the late 1990's."
I *never* said that the 'initial problems' did not begin much earlier (in fact, I said they had been ongoing for 'decades'....)
Rather, I simply pointed out that the most deaths from the ethnic cleansing campaign by the Sudanese government (and from the rebellion) had happened in the recent six years --- not in the 'eighties or even early 'nineties.
You seem to want to keep slipping away from this one point... but I *never* said fighting was not a long-standing affair. (In fact: a reasonable argument could be made that this region of Africa has been a front line in an ongoing war between the world's two foremost expansive 'desert religions', Islam and Christianity, for a LONG, LONG time... stretching back for centuries.)
Re: "...would we have gone into Sudan in the 1990's, or now?"
Well... it seems fairly obvious that we are not doing much of anything about the issue *now* (certainly no military involvement --- Hell, we aren't even interested in supporting any of the AU troops, and there has been no talk out of official Washington about using our own).
During the earlier phase of the crisis (early nineties, when the rebellion was more active), I believe it would be fair to say that there were a number of cross-currents pulling and pushing on the US: the belated admission that we had slept through the Riwandan Genocide, and the push-back from Congress in the matters of our Somalia intervention (and even the targeting of the 'pharmaceutical plant' in Sudan, supposedly affiliated with a bio-weapons program for al Qaeda)... all of which created a situation where it proved difficult even to respond to the ethnic cleansing and ongoing massacres in the former Yugoslavian States. And, when we committed there, our focus was on SouthEast Europe, and on Saddam's violations of the 'no-fly zones', etc. |
