>What I am trying to explain is why Nader did NOT take an open
>position against Bush's and Gore's hands off approach to the Rwandan
>genocide. I am saying that he may not have done so because it would
>have alienated him from many of his supporters (say 30 or so
>percent) who are American first anti globalizers, i.e., right wing
>populists. Nader would then have been left with only 1.4% of the
>vote. But you explain to me why Nader did not say a thing.
***** Nader: I'm often asked that: "What would you have done at the end point in Kosovo, the end point at this hotspot, East Timor, etc." The answer is that I wouldn't have let it go that far.
The idea of using lethal force against people who are throwing rocks - youngsters - is abhorrent; I don't think anybody can justify that kind of bloodshed when one party has such huge military superiority over the other.
Now, can we influence that? I think we could. We have very close relations with the state of Israel. To have 60 people die like that, some of them kids. In our country, when we have riots and people get shot, like at Kent State in the '60s, people say, "What's going on here? Lethal force, the overuse of force?"
But the process is going in the right direction; the Israelis have recognized the right of return up to 100,000 refugees, which is a good start. Other countries in the world are getting together some sort of foreign aid package, and the question is, how much of the land in the West Bank and Gaza is going to be a Palestinian state, and are they going to be just autonomous, will they have an independent political system?
The question is, will they have a democratic Palestinian state? That's another problem. One small advance creates a problem.
Anywhere around the world we are very reluctant to support the downtrodden. East Timor, Rwanda ... We don't have the U.N. international peacekeeping force that we should have, clearly, so we don't have to go around the world being a policeman.
Europe should have dealt with Yugoslavia and its neighbors; instead, Germany supported the Croatian breakup - that's what started it.
So the situation everywhere is one where corporations are deeply involved. The Persian war was a battle over oil that could have been easily prevented, just the way it was prevented in 1961.
You know how it happened in 1961? The dictator of Iraq starts the tanks rolling into Kuwait, saying Kuwait is Iraq, and the [Kuwaitis] call up London and [say], 'Send three little battalions of paratroopers' and they land, and the tanks go back to Baghdad.
We had three weeks watching in 1990, why didn't we do it? It's very interesting. Our diplomats gave Saddam Hussein a go signal - we don't get involved in these internal disputes - and he took advantage of it.
We could've easily sent a couple battalions and said, "Look, you're going to be faced with a resistance," and he would've gone back to Baghdad. Why did it happen? Because we wanted control of the Middle East oil, and we got it.
<http://www.studentadvantage.com/article/print/0,4281,c8-i0-t0-a112908,00.html> *****
Nader & the Greens are more interventionist than the Dems, for better or worse.
BTW, the U.S. government didn't take a hands-off approach to Rwanda. It backed the group of Tutsis led by Kagame, whilst jockeying to diminish the French influence in Central Africa. See, for instance, Joan Casòliva and Joan Carrero, "The African Great Lakes: Ten Years of Suffering, Destruction and Death," at <http://www.fespinal.com/espinal/english/visua/en93.htm#4> for more info.
>I wouldn't know but overwhelming black support for Gore probably had
>a thing or two to do with Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University
>and things like that (that could have rankled a few overly sensitive
>black people), not the stellar record of Clinton or Gore. It is my
>impression that Hitchens simply inferred from black voting patterns
>that blacks must be in love with Clinton or think he can't do no
>wrong. Maybe blacks just can't stand the site of Bush, Cheney,
>Gingrich or Rumsfeld.
Most of the blacks who vote figure that the Dems at least don't go out of their way to insult them, but blacks who don't vote (1) are disfranchised due to the war on crimes; (2) don't care about differences between the Dems & the Repubs; or (3) are too busy to vote. One must also keep in mind the post-Civil Rights polarization within black communities: some rich blacks have really made it, a good number of blacks have become much better off than before, while poor blacks have become poorer yet. One expects a lot less ideological cohesion today than in the past (though it's not that there was unity in the past either).
>I don't look at things the way someone like he does. Moreover, I
>think elite support for a free trade is largely a sham--look at the
>free trade act with Africa. Did the US open up its markets?
On one hand, American leftists should oppose American protectionism; on the other hand, free trade agreements are mixed bags, which probably have more negative consequences than positive ones for poor nations in the short term.
Yoshie