Will the Arrest of One Curtail the Diabolical Attacks In Eastern Congo?

Back in December of 2008 I blogged about how parents would pay to have their children shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, just to spare them the trauma they would endure at the hands of bloodthirsty murderers everywhere.

From the Christmas Congo massacre.

Marguerite Animbwefwo managed to escape the onslaught by Ugandan rebels with her 7-year-old son. But she is wracked with guilt, despairing that she couldn't save her 13-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son, killed in a Christmas Day rampage on her northeastern Congo village of Nawangu.

"They killed everyone else in the village. We are the only ones living," she said Monday.

Among victims at Dorouma hospital is a 3-year-old girl whom rebels tried to kill by twisting off her head. She is paralyzed from the neck down and both her parents were killed in the attacks.

A little over one month later, Congolese Rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, "the general of a rebel group in eastern Congo, who has threatened to take over the country, and whose fighters recently brought central Africa to its most turbulent moment in years" has been caught.

As we have seen throughout history, the personal charisma of one man can "move mountains". Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, Martin Luther King, Fidel Castro, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Osama bin Laden, Jack Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, etc. have all used their abundance of charisma to change the course of history for the greater good or the purely evil. Nkunda, it appears, is one of those men who is dangerously blessed with this "divine gift, or gift of grace", as his rebel army seemed to crumble the day after he was arrested.

He had built one of the best-organized, best-trained bush armies in Africa. His soldiers always carried their rifles pointing down and kept their uniforms incongruously spotless, even though they marched through a world of mud.

But all that acclaimed discipline, which had helped the rebels to rout the Congolese government troops just about every time they faced off, seems to have vanished as fast as its leader.

Obviously charisma - like genius - alone, is not enough. Not only does the person have to take full advantage of his or her gift, the right circumstances and followers must also come together in order to transform charisma into what can become the most powerful lethal weapon or omnipotent saving grace.

Nkunda's arrest, more than likely, will not be enough to settle Eastern Congo, however, Nkunda's absence has already brought more "peace" to this area, than seen in quite some time. However, considering the level of unimaginable brutality in Eastern Congo, peace is a relative word. Nkunda's powerful persona, and his connection to the Rwandan Army and top Rwandan officials, especially Rwandan President Paul Kagame, could jeopardize what appears to be a step in the right direction.

Excellent articles:

Peace in Congo? by Josh Ruxin

Calm in Kigali. Horror in Congo by Josh Ruxin.

Crisis in Congo. by Nicholas Kristof

The Three Worst Places to Live by Nicholas Kristof

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Dick Cheney...An Iranian Mole?

If an 18-year-old American soldier were caught slipping obscure military paperwork to Iranian spies, he would be arrested, pilloried in the news media and tossed into prison for years.

But in fact there’s an American who has provided services of incalculably greater value to Iran in recent years. So you have to wonder: Is Dick Cheney an Iranian mole?

Consider that the Bush administration’s first major military intervention was to overthrow Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, Iran’s bitter foe to the east. Then the administration toppled Iran’s even worse enemy to the west, the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

You really think that’s just a coincidence? That of all 193 nations in the world, we just happen to topple the two neighboring regimes that Iran despises?

Moreover, consider how our invasion of Iraq went down. The U.S. dismantled Iraq’s army, broke the Baath Party and helped install a pro-Iranian government in Baghdad. If Iran’s ayatollahs had written the script, they couldn’t have done better — so maybe they did write the script ...

We fought Iraq, and Iran won. And that’s just another coincidence?

Or think about broader Bush administration policies in the Middle East. For six years, the White House vigorously backed Israeli hard-liners and refused to engage seriously in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus nurturing anti-Americanism and religious fundamentalism. Then last summer, the White House backed Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which turned Iran’s proxies in Hezbollah into street heroes in much of the Arab world.

Consider also the way the administration has systematically antagonized our former allies in Europe and Asia, undermining chances of a united front to block Iranian development of nuclear weapons. Mr. Cheney may nominally push for sanctions against Iran, but by alienating our allies he makes strong sanctions harder to achieve.

And by condoning torture and extralegal detentions in Guantánamo, the White House antagonized Muslims around the world and made us look like hypocrites when we criticize Arab or Iranian human rights abuses. Take Mr. Cheney’s endorsement of the torture known as waterboarding, which simulates drowning: “It’s a no-brainer for me,” he said. The torturers in Iran’s Evin prison must have cheered. They got a pass as well.

Even at home, Iran’s leaders have been bolstered by President Bush and Mr. Cheney. Iran’s hard-liners are hugely unpopular and the regime is wobbly, but Bush administration policies have inflamed Iranian nationalism and given cover to the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Mr. Cheney isn’t an Iranian mole. Nor is he a North Korean mole, though his we-don’t-negotiate-with-evil policy toward North Korea has resulted in that country’s quadrupling its nuclear arsenal. It’s also unlikely that he is an Al Qaeda mole, even though Al Qaeda now has an important new base of support in Iraq.

Like Kennedy and Johnson wading into Vietnam, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney harmed American interests not out of malice but out of ineptitude. I concede that they honestly wanted the best for America, but we still ended up getting the worst.

Our national interests are as vulnerable to incompetence as to malicious damage. So we must identify and abandon the policies that backfired so catastrophically. The common threads of those damaging policies are clear: a refusal to negotiate with “evil”; an aggressive willingness to use military force to solve problems; contempt for our allies; and the bending of legal and moral principles to allow indefinite detention and even torture, particularly for anyone with olive skin and a Muslim name.

Whenever we’ve suspected a mole in our midst, we’ve gone to extreme lengths to find the traitor. This time, betrayed not by a mole but by failed policies, let’s be just as resolute. It’s time to uproot policies that in the last half-dozen years have damaged American interests incomparably more than any mole or foreign spy ever has in the last 200 years.

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