A sea of troubles

[muckefuck]

A Friend (IRL, an acquaintance) posted in his LJ:

Well, I'm not an Iraqi mother trying to comfort her children right now. She must be the most sorrowful creature on the planet right now.

I didn't want to respond there, because it would've sounded crass, but I don't agree. The most sorrowful creatures on the planet are suffering in countries where there are no reporters "embedded" in platoons or holed up in hotels in the capital waiting for footage of aerial bombardment. The EU is not meeting to discuss reconstruction of their devastated homelands and there isn't a raft of NGOs waiting to play watchdog during the occupation. The world has forgotten them, and they know it.

Cold comfort to the Iraqis, of course, but worth keeping in mind as we focus minutely on one trouble spot on a troubled globe.

Comments

Re: pitiful

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think you may have touched on one of the fundamental contraversies in political science: Engagement or isolation? When there's a regime doing thing you don't like, do you oppose and undermine it; contain and isolate it; or engage it and hope to exert a beneficial influence? If the USA were truly totally opportunistic, I don't think it would pressure Turkey, China, and Egypt, to pick some egregious offenders, on human rights as they do. (The case of Turkey is an especially striking argument for engagement: When the EU holds out hope of membership, it moves to clean up its act; when it doesn't, Turkey backslides.)

Another problem is that a lot of our foreign policy is hostage to special interest groups. The Anti-Castro Cubans are one of the most powerful examples of this, but hardly the only one; a strong Armenian lobby in the USA has hampered aid and involvement in Azerbaijan--with its tremendous underexploited reserves of oil--for instance. Domestic political considerations like these also help prevent foreign policy from being as consistent or as rights-based as we'd like it to be.