Events in the Darfur region of Sudan continue to spin crazily out of control, cruelty and suffering abound.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour said that killings and maimings occur every day. She called the situation, “horrific” at a meeting in Geneva and said that countries in the Horn of Africa were “in denial” on the subject of genocide.
The Sudanese government and a crazed Arab Muslim militia called the “Janjaweed” are responsible, a fact even acknowledged by the UN.
Yet two weeks ago, the UN Human Rights Council, with 47 countries as members, many of them serious human rights violators themselves, rejected a resolution asking Sudan to prosecute those responsible for the violence. Instead they adopted a weak-kneed resolution that encouraged everyone involved to just get along. Of course, if they had accepted the resolution to prosecute those responsible for the horrors of Darfur Sudan’s leaders would have to arrest and prosecute themselves, something, safe to say, that’s not about to happen.
This war started three years ago when rebel groups attacked the Sudanese government. Soon, the government organized and armed the Janjaweed and gave them carte blanche to rape, murder and pillage.
Full-page ads, paid for by humanitarian groups, calling for the Bush administration to intercede in Darfur, have been running frequently in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other large US newspapers.
As a kicker to this story, the Norwegian Refugee Council has been operating the largest refugee camp in Darfur, giving about 300,000 people food, shelter and medicine. Last month, the camp in Southern Darfur,was forcibly closed and the Norwegians were booted from the country. Their crime? They had been defending victims of rape and pillage and they had criticized the Sudan government in Khartoum.
Rowan Scarborough in the Washington Times this week said that all six members of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leaders of our military, are against pulling troops out of Iraq now and are opposed to offering a public withdrawal timetable.
Those men are the heads of the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy –along with the Chairman, Marine General Peter Pace.
Scarborough said the Joint Chiefs have been meeting a couple of times a week to review a list of options for President Bush.
The Pentagon has said all options are on the table –but on the subject of quick withdrawal the issue seems to be settled, regardless of recommendations from the Baker-Hamilton Committee Iraq Study Group report just released as I write this. The ISG recommendations –which they call “a new way” -as if there is ever such a thing in so heavily noodled a foreign policy dilemma as the war in Iraq - offers methods and approaches the commission says will improve the Iraqi criminal justice system, strengthen the US reconstruction efforts, improve the training of US government personnel and troops as well as offering a fresh public assessment of US intelligence efforts.
Gen. Peter Pace this past week endorsed shifting more Iraqi forces into the area around Baghdad, which has been hit so hard by violence, and where both Shia and Sunni terrorists have been trying to get a foothold to take over the city.
My old friend Duncan Hunter, head of the House Armed Services Committee has advocated sending more Iraqi battalions to Baghdad.
Gen Pace was quote in the Times as saying he thinks that idea “has a good amount of appeal…”
Hunter, a long-time conservative Republican Congressman from southern California, has said he is seriously considering a run for the Republican nomination for President.
Duncan is a decent, intelligent, down-to earth-fellow. He is a real patriot –a former Army paratrooper who fought in Vietnam. (He is a lawyer but we should not hold that against him.) He has been a friend of mine for more than 25 years.
Duncan will make an interesting campaigner. For one thing he is highly energetic, very tough and completely indefatigable. When I ran for Mayor of San Diego more than twenty years ago, Duncan campaigned for me. He had me up at 4:00 am to join him at 5:30 every morning greeting workers, shaking hands, patting backs and passing out fliers, as thousands of potential voters poured through the gates into their factories for work. At 7am we would start hitting working-class diners and small coffee shops, walking from seat to seat at the counters and down the rows of tables shaking hands and greeting people. I lost the election but I gained considerable respect for Duncan Hunter –and I met and chatted with thousands of nice Americans.
Duncan Hunter is hardly a household name in America. Despite a fine and solid record in the House he is one of 435 members and little known nationally. But the media is more pervasive than it has ever been and it takes no time at all to become a well-known political player once you are an announced presidential candidate –and if reporters decide to take you seriously.
Did you see that the US is hitting Kim Jong Il of North Korea right where it counts, in his supply of toys and booze?
Effective this Christmas, the US is cutting off a supply of luxury goods to North Korea –no more Harley Davidson motorcycles, or Cognac, or caviar or camcorders.
As the Washington Post noted, the list of banned items reads like Santa’s List: water skis, race cars, station wagons, DVD players, Daffy Duck cartoons (supposedly his favorites, next to the porn film of Pamela Anderson and her tattooed ex husband.) Not that any of Kim’s impoverished and starving masses could afford luxuries anyway. They have barely enough to eat, beyond tree bark and grass. And no boycott will affect Mr. Kim himself. He is a famous horder, and he likely has a large stash of all of these things stored in his underground caverns anyway. After all, he has bragged that he owns 20,000 movies on video.
But the import restrictions may have some effect on his circle of well-fed and pampered sycophants and cronies –let us hope.
Kim Jong Il is a self-centered little guy, 5’3 tall and about 185 pounds, with hair stacked as high as his opinion of himself. The man eats with sterling silver chopsticks and keeps a large harem of girls ages 13 to 40 a group he refers to as his “Pleasure Brigade.”
The sad, unstated part of this widely-covered story is that the boycott of luxury goods is how we in the West get even with Mr. Kim for scaring the Hell out of the World by setting-off a nuclear bomb last month: We put the kibosh on fountain pens and cashmere scarves. That’ll show ‘em! Pathetic.
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