Why do we have to clean up this mess ???

[pickel]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/africa...ria/index.html


More body bags and purple hearts.

[Siliconjunkie]

Because its important to ignore our problems at home and try to fix everyone elses.

edit: I was going to edit this, but I think I will let it be just like it is. It is a sarcastic statement, but there is alot of truth in it. Look around your town/city and see what needs to be done, I'm sure there is plenty.

[willy_ph]

Because its important to ignore our problems at home and try to fix everyone elses.

Well that's a pretty ignorant statement.

[Mike]

Originally posted by Siliconjunkie
Because its important to ignore our problems at home and try to fix everyone elses.

That's funny.. I'll pretend I didn't read something so moronic.

[RADAR1797]

You mock his statement, but what is your reasoning?

-RADAR

[Chuckiechan]

Probably to blunt Howard Dean's offensive. He is gunh-ho for another "peace keeping" mission.

Stragecally, they carry no weight. But in the future they could be melded in to a friendly country (like Germany used to be during the cold war) where we could build bases and start conducting covert operations and intelligence gathering against the some of the more FUBAR African governments.

There's lots of work to be done in Africa, but the governments are the problem.

[Siliconjunkie]

Um, I think I need to go wipe the sarcasam off my original post. Apparently it isnt obvious enough.

[Siliconjunkie]

willy_ph and Mike,

What is so ignorant and moronic about it? It's quite easy to just call someone who you don't even know ignorant or moronic, but it doesn't say much about you when you make no attempt to explain why they are so wrong/stupid/ignorant.

I have no problems with anyone disagreeing with me, but at least provide a little reasoning more than petty name calling.

[M_Six]

It's quite easy to just call someone who you don't even know ignorant or moronic

I don't think they were referrnig to you specifically, just your statement. Although I feel your statement carries a lot of truth. There are serious issues being ignored in this country while we dump gobs of money and way too many lives into other countries. While we're trying to make the world safe from terrorism, we're allowing schools, Medicare, and Social Security to go right down the tubes here. The balance MUST shift back soon or we'll have more problems here than in the rest of the world combined.

[Harold7]

And just what will be accomplished by sending military forces from America (or any other western country for that matter) other than providing more targets for the warring factions and only a temporary window of lessened violence?

Unless the western democracies are going to stay there and re-colonize Africa and reimpose western political, religious and economic structures on Africa, I don't see anything much being accomplished other than pouring our national wealth down a rat hole and into the pockets of dictators and corrupt bureauracracies.

Africa is a cultural, political and economic disaster that the West is never going to be able to fix by sending in troops or pouring in economic aid... just look at what happened in Somalia, our bleeding heart media pulled at America's heartstrings with all the pictures of starving kids, but when we tried to do something to fix the problem it turned into a disaster. because they're more interested in killing us or each other than in creating stable societies... the Warlord or tribal headman tradition is alive and well in Africa and there isn't much we can do to change that fact.

There is no way that the 21st century technological cultures of the West can ever hope to do anything about helping a continent filled with Iron Age cultures, animist religions, muslim xenophobia and hatred of the West and tribal hatreds that go back centuries.

The continent of Africa might as well be on a separate plane of existence for all the relevence they have to the modern world... there is no possibility that African cultures can ever avoid falling further and further behind western cultures.

Maybe once we get one world government under the UN, we (the West) can tax ourselves into poverty redistributing our wealth to solve the problems in Africa.

All that probably sounds intensely racist to our liberal friends, but it isn't intended to be anything other than an objective assesment of the pragmatic reality of dealing with Africa.