111–120 of 213 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a section of the article covering precisely this, headed "The external actors: arms to both sides"
It is not covered in anywhere the same level of detail, in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I do not know who it is "we", but Trump is certainly NOT trying to stop sending soldiers abroad. Instead, it is using them to attack Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, boats on the see cause killing is fun and to threaten Greenland. Iran is completely pointless and expensive war in particular. Also, pressuring Ukraine to give up more territory then Russia took is NOT "stopping to mess in other peoples affairs" either. Also, what…
Let's be honest. If someone did send in the troops to restore order, people would be screaming "How dare you invade a sovereign country" or "You're only doing this because you want oil" or "The President wants to make Sudan the 51st state" or "You're wasting money and soldiers' lives messing around in a place most of us can't even put on a map" or "You're just doing whatever the Jews tell you to do."
If Sudan had oil though, we'd probably have already see the US militarily involved.
[flagged]
And you will be held as responsible for exploiting the country if you do actually manage to end the conflict and bring about positive economic change. People don't understand that it takes generations to train a populace to work in a functioning economy. Sudan would probably need 25 years of colonization before you had competent Sudanese to run all parts of a modern economy. You can't just go in, stop the fighting, a…
Like 99.99% of this continent, Sudan was under colonial rule. And it lasted nearly sixty years if you only count the British one (The Ottomans had a sting earlier).
Now I do fancy myself anti-imperialist, but even I cannot deny that the Brits did all that. They established systems, trained generations of locals, and left a decent seed for a competent state and economy. But still, here we are!
One could argue that this “intervention” was itself a cause of this civil war. Stitching a country out of completely different -and perhaps even incompatible- racial and ethnic elements a great deal of which don’t even recognise any political borders, leave one dictated by an outsider, wasn’t exactly going to end any other way.
Personally, while I do believe the Brits share the blame, I don’t assign them much of it. This hellhole had been ruled by its people for 68 years now, during which we’ve repeated the same weak democracy-junta cycle three times (four if you count the last transitional gov). The ability to notice patterns is like entry-level human skill…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not know who it is "we", but Trump is certainly NOT trying to stop sending soldiers abroad. Instead, it is using them to attack Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, boats on the see cause killing is fun and to threaten Greenland. Iran is completely pointless and expensive war in particular. Also, pressuring Ukraine to give up more territory then Russia took is NOT "stopping to mess in other peoples affairs" either. Also, what…
[flagged]
I feel like I have seen better analysis of this elsewhere. In a nutshell, it is not simply a civil war. Regional actors are involved as a proxy war: Saudi Arabia against the UAE, for example (who are also having a proxy war in Yemen). And Egypt against Ethiopia. The wikipedia article covers some of the complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudanese_civil_war_(2023%E2%80... EDIT: This is what I am thinking of: htt…
One factor this article skips over is that UAE and the Abraham Accords makes the US reluctant to rein in their buddies. This might change due to the UAE not being very happy about the US dragging them into a regional war.
Concretely: the US has tied its Gulf diplomacy, arms sales, and regional security architecture to the normalization framework, and the UAE is the pivot. Calling out UAE arms transfers to the RSF would mean fracturing that, which nobody in Washington wants to do, Biden administration included.
On the second point I'd be more cautious. There were signals after the Iran escalation that Abu Dhabi was getting nervous about regional entanglement, and some reporting suggested a partial cooling on RSF support. But I haven't seen hard evidence that the arms pipeline has actually slowed, and the ICC evidence-gathering announcements haven't produced any UAE course correction yet. The incentive structure to keep hedging via Hemedti is still intact as long as the RSF controls Darfur and the gold flows.
Fair catch on the Accords piece though, that's a gap.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Can any downvoters explain the downvotes?
Is anyone stopping any of the genocides around the world? Governments and citizenry are engaged in many attempts to wholly eradicate cultures and minorities. Sometimes fast, like Israel attempting to eradicate Palestinians. Sometimes they are slow, like the barriers put into place against indigenous communities after generations of genocide against them. It's not new either. Sudan, Uyghers, Rohingya, Yazidi, Armenian…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And you will be held as responsible for exploiting the country if you do actually manage to end the conflict and bring about positive economic change. People don't understand that it takes generations to train a populace to work in a functioning economy. Sudan would probably need 25 years of colonization before you had competent Sudanese to run all parts of a modern economy. You can't just go in, stop the fighting, a…
Colonizing only helps the colonizers, not the indigenous population. > So you end up with 25 years of being held responsible (by the world and by the local population) As they should.
I am not sure that this statement is completely true in all cases.
Take for example the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean. Romans tended to win their wars because they had superior organization - they could field more armies, and equip those armies, better than their adversaries, even if their adversaries had better commanders (eg Hannibal).
Once conquered by the Romans, the indigenous population got access to all the benefits of being part of Rome's 'empire' - access to what was then one of the largest trade network, the roads, the aqueducts, the Roman legal system...
I do believe, although, not being a professional historian I have the humility to admit my belief could be wrong, than overall being conquered by the Romans led to an overall increase in living standards for the local population.
Or consider the brutal conquest of what is now Mexico by the Spanish. We rightly remember the conquistadors as being incredibly violent and oppressive, but if large swaths of the local population chose to join them in their assault on the Aztec empire, it may have been because the Aztecs were even more violent - indeed, if my understanding of Aztec culture is correct, the Aztec religion required a human sacrifice every day to ensure that the sun would rise. Compared to that, arguably even the Spanish Inquisition is a step up.
Finally, consider that the practice of slavery in what is now Algeria ended only in 1830, when the French colonized it. Now you can accuse the French colonizers of being vicious brutes (and you'd have a lot of evidence to support that claim), but... at least they weren't enslaving anyone. Of course, this last point makes a value judgement that basically boils down to "slavery is always bad", if you have a value system where "some things, including colonization/colonial/imperialist violence are worse than slavery, then you can safely discount it ^_^