Evil Americans Urged To Send Troops

There's an iron (self-hating) liberal law on the presence of US troops overseas. If there's any way in which their troops can be said to be defending US national interests, Yankee Go Home. If their soldiers are getting shot in the interests of some third party, send more - as many as you can (and we'll forget all about it before you can say 'Kosovo').

So while the presence of US forces in Iraq is an affront to the Guardian's Seamus Milne, their presence in Sudan may not be so unwelcome.

Human Rights Watch, who have been among the fiercest critics of US military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, have called on US Secretary of State Colin Powell to warn Sudanese authorities that the international community will protect the civilians in Darfur, if the Sudanese government fails to do so.

I'm presuming that by 'the international community' he doesn't mean the Dutch or Greeks.

Darfur is a sticky one for liberals. It wasn't so bad when Arabs were massacring black African Christians and animists in the forty years of ongoing war in the South (two million dead so far). That sort of violence, like that in the Congo, doesn't count.

But now they're massacring their fellow Muslims in a war that strangely hasn't caused outrage on the Arab street, Preston to be twinned with Darfur, or the Muslim Association of Britain to call for anti-war protests.

After all, everything bad in the world is caused by evil white men like Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell - so when Powell is greeted by Muslims as a saviour, best to just ignore it.

After visiting a refugee camp in northern Darfur, Mr Powell warned that the UN will take action ... - The Guardian

Secretary of State Colin Powell was mobbed by thousands of desperate Sudanese on Wednesday as he toured a camp in the western Darfur region for people forced to flee their homes by rampaging militias. - News24.com

Worse still for liberals, the violence reveals possible racism against black Africans by Arabs, and brings the other slavery to their attention. For a thousand years the African slave trade meant the Arab slave trade, as slaves were taken to the great markets at Cairo and Marrakesh, or shipped from Zanzibar. Best just stick to the Atlantic Triangle and West Africa, shall we ?

Along ancient Saharan trade routes, 1,300 years of shared history that have mingled the faiths, cultures and skin tones of Arabs and Africans has left another, more vicious legacy: Arab-African slavery that has endured as long as the two peoples have been together, leaving black Africans fighting perceptions of themselves as lesser beings, and of Arabs as the civilizing, conquering force.

Today, the old roles are playing out at their most extreme in Sudan's Darfur region, with murderous results: Arab horseman clutching AK-47s raze non-Arab African villages and drive off and kill the villagers, in what rights groups call an ethnic cleansing campaign backed by Sudan's Arab-led government.