Humanitarianism and Realism

Not two words that you hear put together all the time, but I think that they work here.

I don't know if you've been over to The Huffington Post yet, but it's HUGE. There's post upon post upon post to read, and I don't know how one person could ever get through it all and get anything else done. So, it was no surprise to me that The Opinion Mill had found a post that I missed yesterday, by my own state's Senator, Jon Corzine. The Senator says:

But even if you put aside the moral case for ending genocide for a moment, consider our own interests in the matter. The failed state that is being created in the wake of this horrific crime will be a hotbed for global instability. I was there, and I saw what’s happening. As I stood in the refugee camps of Eastern Chad, into which hundreds of thousands of desperate people are pouring over the border, I realized how dangerous to America the situation has become. Not only is Darfur a lawless part of an unstable state, but the conflict there is destabilizing Chad.

The refugees, even when they are receiving food and shelter, have nothing to do. Resentment is building. And Eastern Chad, which has insufficient resources for its own population, cannot accommodate the refugees for long. We must stop this genocide, and we also must bring about a long-term political solution to this crisis. With two million people in refugee camps in Chad and camps for displaced persons in Darfur, we are creating the conditions for the collapse of law and order in an entire region and, potentially, for terrorism.

There you have it. An argument that we should help our keep our fellow man from getting slaughtered, if only to protect ourselves against future terrorist attacks. The only bigger motivator in today's world seems to be people's pocketbooks, and one can certainly argue that terrorism is costing the US more and more money every day.

When we headed over to Iraq with guns blazing I posted that I wondered why it was important to liberate those people, but not the ones in the Sudan who were being killed in frightening numbers for no reason at all. I still don't know why people wouldn't think this is important.