I wrote the following in another thread, but wanted some feedback from people on both sides of the argument. So I'm making it an OP. A few things: I don't support most US interventions overseas, but I do generally support this president. I think oil's a big factor in where the US decides to protect human lives, but I don't think it's the only factor. Specifically, the news from Libya was so horrendous that I have been supportive of US & Nato air strikes there. I only post the following because I naturally wonder "Why not elsewhere?"
I also post this knowing that I may have been manipulated into supporting this intervention by the amount of publicity given to Ghaddafi's attacks on his own people, which has been far greater than the cases that I've cited below. I especially welcome any corrections to my facts or perspectives. Maybe the media attention is closer because Libya is so much more closer to Europe, or perhaps because Moammar Ghaddafi is such a straight up oddball that his behaviors naturally draw more media attention. But he's far from the only murderous eccentric backed by thugs in the world. My questions "Why him now? aren't easy to answer. But read what I wrote and please tell me where I'm wrong.
The world quietly waited out the
1971 Bangladesh atrocities.
Between 200,000 and 3 million killed. No oil was involved.
America policy was generally to ignore the
slaughter of 200,000 in
Guatemala in the 60s. No oil was involved.
Burundi has gone through two genocides and neither air cover nor military intervention were brought to bear. In 1973 the Tutsi army killed 80,000-200,000 Hutus. In 1992, Hutus gained power and retaliated against Burundi_genocide Tutsis. Both events struggled for any media attention in America. No oil was involved.
In the 70s,
Equatorial Guinea saw so much slaughter and human abuse that it was nicknamed "the Auschwitz of Africa" and yet dictator
Francisco Macías Nguema was freely suffered to rule his little country with no western intervention. No oil was involved.
In 1987, threats to Kuwaiti oil from Iranian attacks led to a US reflagging operation called
Operation Earnest Will to protect world oil exports. Oil was involved.
In 1991,
Iraq invaded Kuwait and largely exaggerated or fabricated accounts of atrocities led to immediate intervention and America's first full scale war since Vietnam. Oil was involved.
About 800,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus were killed by Hutu extremists in
Rwanda in 1994 while the industrialized world fretted and regretted, but did not bring any force to bear. No oil was involved.
While Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge
murdered about 2 million Cambodians in
The Killing Fields, the world whinged and whined, but did not intervene. No oil was involved.
The Indonesian government used
starvation as a weapon in East Timor in the 80s and 90s, resulting in about
100,000 to 150,000 deaths. Oil was involved, but it was easier to get at by ignoring the loss of life. Complaints were registered on occasion, but business was never interrupted.
The Argentine
Dirty War went on for seven years and over
10,000 dead without direct external pressure. No oil was involved.
Half a million were killed in Ethiopia's
Red Terror, but no one sent in the troops. No oil was involved.
When Saddam Hussein was killing the Kurds, the bombs didn't drop, but then that might have interrupted the flow of oil. China does whatever it likes in Tibet with only words from the outside world to punish them for it. North Korea is a country-sized prison under the grip of an insane man who happens to have no oil. Pygmies in the Democratic Republic of Congo are targeted for murder, cannibalism, and rape under what the Human Rights Watch calls a "campaign of extermination," but no one says we should bomb there. In Somalia, West Papua, and Darfur, Sudan, horrible slaughters either by government forces or by those protected by government forces, but no direct efforts are being undertaken--only sanctions
some of the time. The only one of those where discussion of intervention ever got started was in Darfur, where oil was involved. The military interventions of the US in the past ten years have included only places (Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan) where violence threatened the flow of fossil fuels to the industrialized world. Where blood flowed far away from the pumps, the impetus to protect lives seems to lack that same peculiar momentum.
So when I say oil was a critical factor, I think there's enough of a history behind US intervention to back up my generalization.