Posted on 07/17/2008 12:17:26 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
DAKAR (Reuters) - Senegal's president said on Thursday George W. Bush told African leaders at one stage the United States might send troops to Sudan's Darfur if they did not act to halt what he saw as genocide there.
President Abdoulaye Wade said Bush, who has lobbied strongly for robust international action to end the five-year-old conflict in Darfur, ...
Commenting on the International Criminal Court chief prosecutor's move this week to seek a war crimes arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Wade said Bush had "always proclaimed loudly and clearly that the United States considered Bashir had committed genocide in Darfur."
"I've had to transmit to President Bashir and to my other African colleagues President Bush's warnings that if Africa didn't do anything to end the tragedy in Darfur, the United States could bypass the (United Nations) Security Council and send contingents to Darfur," the Senegalese leader said in a statement issued in Dakar.
"Myself and other African colleagues tried to dissuade him from this and to convince him to leave us to try to sort out this problem among us Africans," he added.
The United States has supported the deployment of a joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur and has even helped to airlift international peacekeepers to and from the violence-torn western Sudanese region.
However Washington, stretched by heavy military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, has stopped short of sending its own troops to Darfur, where foreign experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in five years of political and ethnic conflict.
Wade said he had taken Bush's warning to send troops to Darfur "very seriously ... especially since in the case of (the U.S.-led invasion of) Iraq, he'd informed me two days in advance."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
A Rwandan soldier from the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) watches girls fetching water on donkeys go past in the town of Tawila, North Darfur in this handout picture taken July 2, 2008. REUTERS/Albany Associates/Stuart Price/Handout
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Darfur supporters of Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir hold up posters of Bashir during a demonstration outside the presidential palace in Khartoum July 17, 2008 against the International Criminal Court's (ICC) indictment of Bashir for genocide. REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah (SUDAN)
“However Washington, stretched by heavy military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, has stopped short of sending its own troops to Darfur, where foreign experts estimate 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes in five years of political and ethnic conflict.”
I knew Reuters would get around to stringing words together to infer that the reason so many people have died in Darfur is because we didn’t do anything.
Meanwhile, the UN worries about human rights in the United States.
NO! NO! and NO!
GET the BODIES from somewhere ELSE. We’ll give you ALL THE ARMS you want. BUT, we save our own for own!!!
African wars are a particular brand of nasty. Let the UN deal with it. No point in sending American troops to take the blame.
I agree. What was W thinking? This is what W should have said:
“The United States is disturbed by the recent inactions by the current government in Darfur. If such inaction continues, we will be sending “supplies” that hasten democratic action in your country.
Such mess which started with the inept leadership of the United Nations, should also be held responsible for such atrocities to continue.”
Agree. We send in Rangers (war crimes arrest warrant) to nab al-Bashir, but do it half-a$$ed—so as to not anger the United Nations—then wind up having to threaten UN `coat-holders’ to send in armor (that we gave them) to extricate our troops, all the while being shot-up by locals we were sent to help. Sounds way too familiar.
Anyway, we got those old wars on drugs, poverty, AIDS, and a real, ongoing social, economic and political problem with a brimming population of “undocumented immigrants”, a prickly Iran/Israel nuclear dilemma.
Not to mention Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, etc. and so forth and so on. Oh, and we’re almost broke . . . .
Other than those things, if we’re going to `screw the pooch’ in broad daylight and in front of the minister and his family, this is plan is worth considering.
Well, shoot...I didn’t mean to kill the thread.
I think it’s a GREAT idea, Dub—go get them dirty dogs.
WWCK do? (What Would Captain Kirk do?) would he abide by the prime directive, or violate it? hmmmm....
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