Obama: Iraqi genocide? Oh well!

Yesterday Barack Obama said that, yeah, genocide could likely happen if we leave Iraq, but that's life.

"Well, look, if that's the criteria by which we are making decisions on the deployment of U.S. forces, then by that argument you would have 300,000 troops in the Congo right now — where millions have been slaughtered as a consequence of ethnic strife — which we haven't done," Obama also told the AP.

I'd argue that an American life is worth just as much as a Congolese or Iraqi or Vietnamese life, and wonder if we'd learned lessons from Rwanda -- where 800,000 were murdered in about 100 days in 1994. When the U.N. wouldn't intervene, Rwandan representatives who escaped the slaughter came to the White House to beg the most powerful country in the world for help -- and were rebuffed, told that the U.S. didn't have enough interests in Africa.

When you can end or prevent genocide and do nothing -- or leave -- how far does that put us away from the lessons of World War II, and how much does our inaction equal complicity in the crimes against not one people, but against humanity?

"The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference." -- Elie Wiesel

Comments

[Senthil]

Sometimes it feels like none of the politicians who talk about Iraq have the slightest shred of sense in their heads.
Obama neglects to see that this level of violence exists in Iraq on the basis of the invasion. Al-Qaeda were not in this country beforehand.
Bitter conflict between Sunni and Shia was not occurring beforehand (granted, Saddam was waging war on Shia neighbourhoods where he suspected a threat to himself, but he did not represent all Sunnis).
Turkey was not placing troops on the border ready to invade Kurdish Iraq in order to control the terrorism of the PKK beforehand.
The truth is, if the troops stay in and it won't be won by a simple 25,000 person surge, get out and there will be genocide, and the world will place the responsibility, not at the hands of those committing the genocide, but at the feet of the US. Much like when a man goes on a rampage with a gun we look at gun laws and not the man.

From a timeline of the next one or two years, this war is a no win situation.
And I hate to say it, since invading in the first place was a mistake, but General Petraeus is right when he says that counter insurgency operations can last up to ten years, and this will be particularly brutal and will have an unknown effect on bolstering support for international terrorism.

But it seems no one has read anything on Iraq's history, people, culture or on the fact that the US trained Iraqi militia for the purpose of counter insurgency against Saddam and now this is being used against the US. So no one has anything worth saying on the matter. Not President Bush, not Obama, not Clinton, Giuliani, Rommney, and most definitely not McCain with his 100 troop and three Black Hawk helicopter escort, to stroll a market in Baghdad!