Cognitive Dissonance

After suffering repeated bouts of the Flu, with associated fevers etc in the last few weeks, hopefully I'm on the road to recovery.

But can't help feeling that I'm in some sort of Fever Dream.

First, we have normal, rational, mainstream newspapers publishing stuff like this :

the fundamentalist Zionist lobby controls politics and the media in the US and Australia

followed by

I thought what I wrote was a statement of fact

and

It is becoming increasingly obvious that John Howard is the lobby's strong choice to win the election, and that means big money and big power will be behind him.

All from Margot's Diary in the Sydney Morning Herald. (But history has been re-written, and the initial entries censored UnThinked by MiniTrue)

Then we have Phillip Adams in The Australian claiming that Saddam Hussein didn't really kill hundreds of thousands, there's no evidence, they may have all just gone out to the corner shop for a packet of fags and be back momentarily etc etc. as well as spouting long-exploded misquotations and downright falsehoods.

I dunno. Things that I might have expected from the Green Left Weekly, Der Sturmer or the Aryan Nations are now appearing in the mainstream press. Hopefully 'This too shall pass' after the coming elections.

There are too many issues, hard issues, that I really should have blogged about. Let's start with Dafur and the Sudan. The situation is that an overtly racist Arab Theocracy, stymied in their genocidal war against Black Christians and Animists in the south, has turned their attention to the Black Muslims in the west.

Something - not just condemnation in the UN - should be done. But what? The Aid agencies are actually withdrawing due to incessant harrasment by the government-sponsored 'militias', UN sanctions are being blocked because the French have Oil interests there, and there appears to be no feasible peaceful means of pursuading the Mullahs in Kahartoum to pull their collective heads in before more millions die. I say 'more', because it's estimated that 2 million have already died in the last decades.

The Military situation is not much more rosy. The heads of Government are in the civilised - as in 'citified' - area of Sudan, where people have such things as water, sewerage, roads, electricity, and even mobile phones. Now a long time ago I did a military analysis of the communications infrastructure in western Sudan, as part of a hypothetical wargame. (This was in 1974 IIRC - one of the few periods where Sudan wasn't inflicted with Civil War. Not much has changed since.) The short answer is that there isn't any. I don't mean 'there isn't much', like in outback Australia or Siberia, I mean there isn't any. Tracks marked on maps are vague indications of routes whose exact courses change every season, and are often only passable by animals or on foot. I say 'Tracks', because in an area about the size of France there are two of them. One runs through Al Fashir through to Faya-Largeau in Chad, that's the only one of any military worth. And you know you've got a Big Problem when Chad starts looking good from a logistics viewpoint.

So we would find it easy to take out the Government that's so odious, but not be able to help the poor devils who actually need the food and medicines. Conventional Military operations in the west would be incredibly expensive, first you'd need to build a road and rail network, that will take a decade. In the short term, a few airbases could pick up the military slack - you'd only need 10,000 troops on the ground in the West (but 100,000 in the East). The cost would be greater than the Iraq war.

But it would stop the Genocide, and how do you put a price on that? For what it's worth, I think that after the US election, if Bush wins, the US taxpayer will be asked to dig deep in their pockets yet again. As will the EU, with or without French co-operation. Whether they'll say 'yes' to the request is another matter. If Howard wins another term, he's already indicated that Australian troops could be committed. And the SASR (Special Air Service Regiment) would be perfect for the job of operating out west, hundreds of kilometres from any support. The Arab Militias are really good at massacring and terrorising unarmed civilians, but to the SAS, they'd be mere targets to be serviced, Fish in the proverbial Barrel.

OK, that's Dafur.

Then there's Zimbabwe. Average Life Expectancy is now 33.9, compared to nearly 60 before Robert Mugabe. Of course a lot of that is due to AIDS, which is turning vast tracts of Africa into depopulated wilderness. But a lot isn't.

Then there's Uzbekistan, whose Dictator and our supposed "ally" in the war against Islamofascism has the endearing habit of boiling Muslims alive. Not suicide bombers or terrorists, any Muslim will do.

Then there's North Korea, whose Dictator appears to be following a script from the Third Reich.

Then there's.... enough. There's a reason why I haven't blogged about all the important stuff going on in the world at the moment. Issues that will affect whether millions will live or die. You can move a mountain one teaspoon at a time, but not if you look at the magnitude of the task too hard.