What Paper am I Reading?
What Paper am I Reading?
Did someone with some sense barricade himself in the Boston Globe’s editorial office?
Arab League futility
March 30, 2006THIS WEEK’S ARAB LEAGUE summit in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, appeared to validate the group’s reputation for idle chatter and obtuse decisions.
If the site of the summit was not callous enough — the host government is the perpetrator of an ongoing genocide in Darfur — the participants made things worse by rejecting a proposal to supplement 7,000 ineffectual African Union monitors in Darfur with a substantial United Nations peacekeeping force. In so doing, the league’s 22 members were accepting the cynical line of Sudan’s genocidal ruler, Omar al-Bashir, who characterized the plan for a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur as a violation of Sudan’s sovereignty.
This gesture of solidarity with the forces behind mass murder, systematic rape, and the ethnic cleansing of non-Arab African tribal groups in Darfur cast a pall on everything else that was said, or left unsaid, by the dignitaries — mostly autocrats — in attendance in Khartoum.
It just goes on and on in that vein–clear-headed, unflinching criticism of the Arab League, without a discouraging word spoken about President Bush or Israel. I’m stunned.