82nd Airborne

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Letter in the March 8th London Review of Books
>
>82nd Airborne
>
>Michael Byers (LRB, 8 February) quotes George W. Bush's National Security
>Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, as saying that 'we don't need to have the 82nd
>Airborne escorting kids to kindergarten.' This much-cited quotation
>appears to refer exclusively to the role of the US Forces in places like
>Kosovo. But in fact the 82nd Airborne was the division sent in by the
>Federal Government in 1957 to desegregate the schools in Little Rock,
>Arkansas, against the wishes of the state authority. As an Afro-American
>beneficiary of this intervention, Rice presumably knows this. The right of
>states to resist Federal power has of course been invoked in order to
>preserve racial segregation. If her remark is not an instance but an
>analogy, how far back do these people plan to turn the clock?
>
>David Edgar
>Birmingham

The U.S. government should enforce desegregation within the borders 
of the USA.  Beyond the borders, it doesn't have the right to do 
anything -- to segregate or desegregate schools in Kosovo or 
Macedonia or whatever.  One can't make an analogy between states 
within the United States of America and sovereign states outside it.

David Edgar is apparently thinking like Empire.

Yoshie