lovely news for a sunday morning

[ursako]

From the NYT:

BUKAVU, Congo - Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore

Comments

[wendolen]

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I wish this weren't old news. I've been reading stories about stuff like this from Congo for years now. :(

[ursako]

From the Congos, from the Sudan; I know we're not supposed to regard the entire continent of Africa as a problem that needs fixing, but there are certainly regions that could be so summarized.
And the thing is, what could we do besides place a platoon in every village, and would that even work? There are times when I wonder whether the early 21st century will be when the U.S. discovers once and for all the limits of its own ability to be the world cop. We can bomb things pretty well, but we can't keep tribe A from fucking up tribe B.

[wendolen]

That would require the ability to learn and remember in our upper echelons, which I see no evidence of.

[ursako]

I don't know- I think if we get enough nasty news from Iraq, the impotence of the U.S. Armed Forces w/r/t sectarian conflicts/civil wars will be well and duly impressed on the better part of the populace.
This isn't a notion that I necessarily like, mind you. As a good liberal, I'd like to believe that as a 'superpower' we can at least prevent genocide and mass rape. I don't know how we'd do it, though, and I'm starting to wonder if we can.

[wendolen]

I think you have more faith in the populace's ability to influence the government than I do, too.

We've yet to successfully prevent genocide even when we wanted to and acted to (sure, Hitler would have killed plenty more if we hadn't gotten to him when we did, but it can hardly be said that we prevented that genocide). There's the issue of our intent, which is at least sometimes noble, but there is also the issue of our power and influence, which is nowhere near as great as it used to be, and I don't think it was ever as great as we thought it was.

[wendolen]

I don't think it was ever as great as we thought it was.

I say this having recently read Howard Zinn and James Loewen, who surely also have agendas, but have generally given me reason to doubt our purported noble intent in an awful lot of history.

[wendolen]

I think you have more faith in the populace's ability to influence the government than I do, too.

BTW, by this I don't mean to imply that I think you're naive. I'm just really cynical about this.

[ursako]

Oh, believe me, I am right there with you. I know that it's hard to find an altruistic military action in our history, with the possible exception of the interventions in Somalia (1991) and the former Yugoslavia (1995-99). The irony there, of course, is that those were both NATO actions that we helped out in, not unilateral actions.
But I can't deduce that just because the nation's actions in the past haven't been altruistic, we aren't capable of such action. I'm not that jaded yet.