As I sat in my hotel room after enjoying this past weekends’ events at the Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC) in Washington D.C., I decided to tune in to some of the evening’s news programs to look for coverage. After watching several of the shows, I tuned in to check out Bill Maher’s show on HBO, Real Time with Bill Maher. This was a big mistake for my conservative heart and mind.
The panel of the show included John Ridley (an author), Joe Scarborough (the host of Scarborough County on MSNBC), and a representative in the House from Massachusetts, Barney Frank. The show started off by first discussing the war in Iraq and what the panel saw as a complete failure. The fact that mistakes were made in the Middle East is undeniable, the president himself has admitted as much. The necessity of the war going on there is what is up for debate. In the minds of the commentators, there is no debate on Iraq as it was presumed that every viewer shared this view (it was Bill Maher on HBO, so they may have been right). The panel briefly discussed Barack Obama’s statement from a week ago (since retracted) that the lives lost in Iraq were “wasted.” Bill Maher and Ridley went on to reiterate this point.
Up to this point in the show, I was doing OK. After all, it was the usual liberal talking points that I was used to, so I wasn’t surprised. However, immediately after the segment on Iraq, the topic moved on to the Darfur region in Africa. Actress and activist Mia Farrow was brought on to talk about the region after visiting the area several times in the last couple of years. Farrow had extremely strong feelings about the treatment of some of the women and children in the region and the overwhelming persecution that they were facing.
The irony of these two segments back-to-back was apparently lost on the Maher’s audience, but I hope not on the rest of the country watching.
How is it that in a matter of minute’s liberals can go from calling our troops lives wasted in Iraq to clamoring for the U.S. and the international community to do something about the civil war going on in Darfur? What do they think would happen there? Somehow we could go in there, wipe out the Janjaweed, and the region would become a peaceful democracy? This is exactly what we are working for in Iraq.
Maher goes on to insinuate that the reason we’re not militarily involved in Darfur, and yet are in Iraq, is because the region of Darfur is completely black. This is ridiculous; if we weren’t in Iraq, would he complain that it was because the people there are Arabic?
Mia Farrow, Don Cheadle, and George Clooney go on talk show after talk show complaining about the U.S. not doing enough in Africa, and in the next breath will endlessly talk about the “disaster” going on in Iraq. The hypocrisy of these comparisons cannot be overstated.
Of course the disastrous problems in Darfur and other regions in Africa need to be addressed, but so do those in Iraq. Even among my conservative friends I’m reminded constantly about the thousands that are killed in Africa; but how quickly we have forgotten the hundreds of thousands killed by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
The recent hyping of Darfur has become popular recently because of Hollywood liberals and politicians looking to jump on the bandwagon of a popular worthy cause, as opposed to Iraq which has become an unpopular worthy cause. The point here isn’t that Darfur doesn’t need attention (both from the United States as well as from the world), but that it is terrible to ignore the comparisons between this region and Iraq. America is having difficulty taking out a government and restoring order, how are we going to control a country that’s in a real civil war? Iraq has become unpopular and weak-willed politicians are looking to jump off what they see as a sinking ship and onto something that is politically a win-win situation; we must not be fooled.
Jarrett Skorup is a student at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He is a student fellow for The Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College. You can contact him here
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2 comments:
well said. Thank you for pointing this out.
However, I disagree with you when you say that if we were in Darfur rather than Iraq, Bill Mahar would complain that we refuse to get involved in the Middle East because the population is completely Arabic. Mahar is able to say the USA has an anti-black slant because, indeed, our country has a history of oppressing blacks, what with slavery and Jim Crow laws. However, our nation has no significant history of oppressing arabics- therefore I think a comment by Mahar about being "anti-arabic" would not be taken seriously. There is little basis for such a comment.
there are human rights violations on large scales all over the globe. China, North Korea, Burma, Venezuala, Iraq, Sudan, etc...
the only reason that we are in Iraq is because there is oil there. If there were oil in N. Korea, you bet your as Bush would have bombed the hell out of it by now and we would have another costly troop presence there.
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