"As for the Sudan, I would argue that Darfur was a by product of the Arabs losing in the South."

Who are the "Arabs"? Both sides are Arabic speaking Africans. In Darfur both sides are Muslim.

"So when you make the accusation show me something better than Iranian news you fucking twit. "

Is Al-Jazeera okay? Or do you just hate Arabs?

Muslim does not equal Arab. Darfur was about race.

I clearly stated to distinguish between Revolution era ex-pats and international students who are lifelong citizens of the Islamic Republic. I think I went to pains to make very clear that distinction and am a bit irritated that you then accuse my of failing to recognize the difference.

"Muslim does not equal Arab. Darfur was about race."

I'm aware that Muslim does not equal Arab. But Darfur was/is not about 'race'. Both sides had so-called "Arabized" and "African" tribes fighting on their side. Both sides are the same race, speak the same language, and practice the same religion. This was about nomadic vs settled communities fighting over water and other resources. It was also the result of a power vacuum in Darfur in which rebel fighters armed by Chad attacked the structures of government in Darfur.

As for the Ivory Coast, they are the primary mover of Cocoa prices. They produce twice as much as Ghana and the market infrastructure is in Abidjan. I spent over 5 years of my life as a commodity trader and was active when cocoa prices were going haywire the last time during the last round of instability.

My best friend is an IR intellectual specializing in West Africa and from my casual conversations with him, I draw the opposite conclusions relative to Liberia-BF-CdI and their martial relations. Taylor was playing a quite significant role in destabilizing CdI and has a reasonably impressive record of being successful in such efforts relative to his neighbors. I do not have the impression that Taylor was at all afraid of his opponents hiding across the border. And he was pretty good at hijacking local conflicts for his purposes.

I like Al Jazeera from what ive seen and watched the channel throughout the winter until i changed my cable company. speaking of Al Jazeera, how about you pull up their report about this whole Israel-Libyan mercenary nexus? I'd love to read it. Fucking Twit

And I don't have animosities against whole peoples like you do.

I really don't care about personal anecdotes. If you had statistics, that'd be one thing. Who is Ouattara? The opposition figure in CDI initiated the civil war in 2002 because of a law which prohibited foreigners from becoming President. He is the same man supposedly recognized as the elected President of CDI. Who backed Ouattara? Burkina Faso. Why? Because Ouattara is from Burkina Faso.

@Putin - I think he was making a reference to the war with the largely Christian rebels in the south

And getting back to the real question and away from this childish "You're a twit." "No, you're a twit." stuff, I think we just have to break it down and look into the future.

First, we have to decide whether this is truly a democratic movement or not. Then, we have to decide when we help them or not. If we don't help them and they succeed in overthrowing the government, they're not going to be too pleased with us now, are they? We are the supposed "defenders of democracy" after all.

On the other hand if we don't help them and they don't succeed, how can we live with ourselves for just standing by and watching them get crushed? It will be 1950s Prague all over again.

Now if we do help them, it pretty much rules out them losing, no matter how little we actually put in. Put then the West is going to be attacked as pursuing its own interests and meddling in other countries affairs.

So, is it worth the international relations hit to ease our moral conscience and help out democratic revolutionaries (IF they're democratic)?

Then of course there is the decision of how much to intervene. I for one say not one soldier should step foot on Libyan soil, lets just precision-bomb the shit out of them

It has always been my understanding that the conflict is Darfur was an Arab vs. black African war from the South transferred to the West as an exercise in local ethnic politics on the part of Bashir. Perhaps Semitic versus African might be better terminology. Obviously, I agree that conflict in the Sahel is frequently understandable in terms of water and that forces across the border in Chad played a role in lighting the fuse. However, again the timing seems to have been driven by the success of the Southern rebels.

It is worth noting though that there is a mural on the wall of King Tut's tomb showing him leading a Semitic army from the Nile into the Western Desert of Nubia to butcher and drive out black nomads.

Sorry but I have no patience for arguments that involve unaccountable "conversations with my X nationality friends". I also have no patience for people who describe governments as "insane". It's old, it's worn, and it's transparent in that only governments that oppose the US are deemed "insane". The fact that the main opponents of the regime in the country, such as Mousavi, are loyal to the Islamic Republic demonstrates that the regime has legitimacy and is not "detached from reality". The fact that he supported the Arab revolutions points to the fact that Iran is very confident in their own standing among their people. Stop calling governments insane. It's ridiculous.

"I think he was making a reference to the war with the largely Christian rebels in the south"

No, he's talking about Darfur. He explicitly said Darfur was about race. That is false.

"Then of course there is the decision of how much to intervene. I for one say not one soldier should step foot on Libyan soil, lets just precision-bomb the shit out of them"

Bomb their radar and AA systems in populated areas with precision bombs which have been known to blow up an afghan wedding party from time to time.

This isnt our fight, stay out unless the region asks us to. Best of luck to the protesters, but the Arab world has made it known how welcome our regime change capabilities are.

"However, again the timing seems to have been driven by the success of the Southern rebels."

That's what I was referring to Putin. Sorry if it was unclear, but I know what Darfur was about

It doesn't matter. There are no "Arabs" between the North and the South, or Khartoum and Darfur. That's a racial element introduced by foreign commentators who like simplistic good guy vs bad guy dichotomies.

@Santa - how many protester/rebel deaths are worth any collateral deaths that we may cause? I understand it will hurt our PR, but how can we call ourselves defenders of democracy if we don't defend democracy? And I personally don't think it will hurt us much, because the whole world is denouncing the current regime. Heck, if what Putin says is right, even Iran supports the rebels

So Putin, just for clarification, are you saying there is no ethnic difference between northern and southern Sudan?

I never claimed that underlying ethnic conflict between the migrant brought into service the plantation economy was not real. The conflicts in Sierra Leon and Guinea were real too. Taylor still fanned the flames and used the resulting conflicts to gain a measure of economic control over large swaths of his neighbor's territory.

And for the record, I do not in the least believe that the 2002 conflict was about who got to be president. An ethnically distinct group was brought into a country to do a great deal of the shit work. They were exploited and denied normalized status within the society. But that had been the case for decades. I would still contend that Taylor having been driven out of Sierra Leone and being in need of a new conflict to assist him in retaining power had more to do with the timing. It may not be the best argument, but the fact that people I knew who proffered this theory of the world predicted after the intervention in Sierra Leone that Taylor would try to exploit this very ethnic conflict in CdI as his next project and it then seemed to happen increased my assigned credibility for the thesis.

Who says we are defenders of Democracy, Woodrow Wilson, George W. Bush? And why do we have to spend American tax dollars and American lives to institute ideals that these rebels might not even accept?

This is not a democracy issue, this is a civil war. It isnt a whole people rising up, it is a segment of the population doing so (albeit probably a larger segment of the population). We didn't learn our lesson in the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and Afganistan?

This is their fight, its not worth the lives, treasure, international standing we might risk.

How about we let the Arab league take the lead on the operations while we provide moral support, until they screw up of course then our press can write about the mess Arab countries have caused doing so

Publicly broadcasting stories which accuse the Israeli government of organizing voter fraud in Iran in favor of their enemies while murdering Palestinian children to harvest their eyes (not quite blood for Matzo, but still) does not seem detached from reality to you? My comments were expressly directed at a specific propaganda organ. Putin, you have repeatedly claimed that I was making comments directed in manners which I went to pains to distinguish between. My comments stated, I think, quite clearly that I was talking about the narratives of the propaganda organs. My "conversations with friends from country X" were to a certain degree about their questioning whether the people in charge of the military and media believed the clearly insane things that they were saying. It was largely in the vein of a book I read a few months ago in which a now middle aged South African recounted listening to Verwoerd speak in person as a child. Verwoerd was an intelligent man, yet he had succumb to a worldview that led him to be, well, insane.....clearly detached from objective reality. I don't think the author in question believed quasi-democratic governance in RSA was illegitimate. The author was not even commenting on the underlying racism of the platform but of its practicality and the manner in which one had to discount reality to advance it. I similarly have little trouble classifying Papa Doc public pronouncements to be insane. Since both Verwoerd and Papa Doc were loyal US allies, I refute your assertion that only enemies of the US are ridiculously accused of being dangerously detached from reality.

" The commission’s report concentrated on three related points. First, the claim that the Darfur conflict pitted ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ was facile. ‘In fact, the commission found that many Arabs in Darfur are opposed to the Janjawiid, and some Arabs are fighting with the rebels, such as certain Arab commanders and their men from the Misseriya and Rizeigat tribes. At the same time, many non-Arabs are supporting the government and serving in its army.’ Second, it has never been easy to sort different tribes into the categories ‘Arab’ and ‘African’: ‘The various tribes that have been the object of attacks and killings (chiefly the Fur, Massalit and Zeghawa tribes) do not appear to make up ethnic groups distinct from the ethnic groups to which persons or militias that attack them belong. They speak the same language (Arabic) and embrace the same religion (Muslim). In addition, also due to the high measure of intermarriage, they can hardly be distinguished in their outward physical appearance from the members of tribes that allegedly attacked them. Apparently, the sedentary and nomadic character of the groups constitutes one of the main distinctions between them’"

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mahmood-mamdani/the-politics-of-naming-genocide-civil-war-insurgency

"Even if you take the terms for granted, the majority of the “Arabs” in Darfur — the southern Rozayqat [Arab clans] — are not involved in the conflict. If you narrow the focus to those who are involved in the conflict, which is the northern Rozayqat, the Fur, the Masaleet, and the Zaghawah, then you realize that the distinction which best captures the difference between them is that the northern Rozayqat are those tribes in Darfur who received no [tribal] homeland, no “dar”, in the colonial dispensation, because the colonial dispensation did not give a tribal homeland to those who were fully nomadic and were thus without settled villages. At the same time, the colonial dispensation gave the largest homelands to peasant tribes with settled villages. At the same time, the colonial dispensation gave the largest homelands to peasant tribes with settled villages.

The conflict between the “dar-less” tribes and those with “dar” was triggered by an ecological crisis. According the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the Sahara expanded one hundred kilometers over forty years. This came to a head in the 1980s pushing the nomadic tribes in the north down south and triggering a classical ecological conflict around the lush central Darfur mountains, the Jebal Marra."

http://sidgsudan.org/2009/02/26/analyzing-darfurs-conflict-of-definitions-interview-with-prof-mahmoud-mamdani/

"Publicly broadcasting stories which accuse the Israeli government of organizing voter fraud in Iran in favor of their enemies while murdering Palestinian children to harvest their eyes (not quite blood for Matzo, but still) does not seem detached from reality to you?"

If we're going to start calling governments "insane" who publish anti-Semitic attacks on Israel, then you'd have to include virtually every government in the Middle East, including all of the American client states. Just a quick glance at translations of Arab media in Egypt, for example, will demonstrate that Al Ahram and other government backed media outlets publish similarly anti-Jewish stories.

Why can't the proponents of western world domination ever come up with some new way of villifying governments who don't kowtow to Washington? Really, the numbers of so-called "insane" leaders that I've heard from you people seems to be unending. Must be that we Americans are the only "sane" people in the world.

The ethnic differences between groups are fluid, and many tribes have divisons amongst themselves and have on both sides of the various conflicts. Any "Arab"-"African" distinction is political and not based on reality. Sudan is so heterogeneous, so diverse, and has had so much intermarrying, that to say one group can be geographically pinned down to the North and has this ethnic/racial characteristics, while the other group can be pinned down to the South and has these ethnic/characteristics is a complete distortion of what is going on.

Calling them insane is a failure on our side for not recognizing their continuous ranting as merely pandering to the fanatical elements of their population. Much like i call Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich insane as well.

has little to do with "Western world domination" though if that makes you feel smarter than everyone else, by all means...

What do you call intervening against any state that has the little semblance of independence? And what do you call those who never saw an opportunity for intervention they didn't like?

Putin, I have not read the report of this commission nor am I fully aware of who they are. I will invest the time at some point in the relatively near future and see whether I must revise my opinion. As for the second message. You seem to be replying to things which I not only did not say, but that I explicitly stated that I was not saying and that I think I went to great lengths to conscientiously distinguish from what you are accusing me of saying. The conversation was clearly and explicitly about the official propaganda organs of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the things that they assert to be true. If someone here quoted Al Ahram as an authoritative source for much of anything, I think it would be reasonable to discount what they were saying. And by the way, who specifically are "you people"?

I've heard a great deal of "vilifying" of the government of Egypt of late, which is hardly rooted in a failure to kowtow to Washington. Libya has been kowtowing to Washington quite a bit over the last 20 years. Plus I think we among the Western domination crowd have done a bag up job vilifying China without questioning the sanity of their leaders. I've questioned the sanity of Verwoerd who clearly kowtowed to Washington. Therefore, I challenge the veracity of the two main things I believe that you are saying.

And just for a bit of even handedness relative to Santa. The president of my country keeps saying that he wishes to solve unemployment in the US by increasing the cost of energy. Clearly this is irreconcilable with objective reality. Either he believes this and has sanity issues or he does not believe this and is dishonestly advancing a political agenda. So either he believes that raising the cost of productive technology will increase employment and economics well-being in which case he is nuts or else he does not and is just using rhetoric to raise the cost of energy because he views it as a worthwhile objective in and of itself even in the face of such action impoverishing the citizens of his own country and reducing aggregate employment. Obviously this is fine as all choices have costs and we can rationally judge the costs to be sufficiently low relative to the objective; however, if he believes the literal truth of what comes out of his mouth than Mr. Obama is clearly detached from reality.

You're making distinctions where none exist. Al Ahram was the Egyptian government's propaganda organ. So how is this different than the stuff you're talking about in Iran? The fact is 'official propaganda organs' throughout the Middle East say anti-Semitic stuff about Jews and Israel. So why is Iran singled out for being 'insane'?

"You people" = interventionists, propagandists for US Empire. People who regurgitate US government talking points on any number of countries deemed 'enemies', such as Libya, Iraq, China, etc, while clamoring for intervention at the first opportunity.

"I've heard a great deal of "vilifying" of the government of Egypt of late, which is hardly rooted in a failure to kowtow to Washington"

Really? I haven't. Biden came out and said Mubarak was not a dictator, Egypt is not Eastern Europe. Blair said he was a "force for good". Berlusconi said he was one of the "wisest of men". Rightwing media in America have been claiming Islamists in Egypt and Communists are uniting to force out governments like Mubarak, and are spreading chaos in the region. So I don't know what you're talking about. Compared to crap being said about Gaddafi, little if anything was said about Mubarak's "state of mind".

So every political leader is insane. If only political leaders listened to the ramblings of random Texans who seem to be the only 'sane' people left. We'd all be better off.