You know, I felt pretty sure that Afghanistan was going to get hung out to dry. I can easily remember when the war started that the Bush administration said they were going to stabilize the country and help protect the fledgling democracy. However, it appears that this is not the case at all. Mind you, that has been being reported as such in the Canadian print media for the better part of a year now.

I felt pretty sure that this was what was going to happen because it's what has happened far too much in the past... there's often been a vast gulf between the words and the deeds coming from the US. I refer you to Bush Sr.'s promise to aid Iraqi's trying to topple Hussein, or the promise to help the mujahadeen after kicking out the Soviets. Considering the commonalities of personnel between those administrations and this one (Reagan, Bush, W. Bush) why would you expect it to be any different?

It's like when Fleischer talked about the UN not helping Rwanda, and forgetting to mention that it was the US (under Clinton) that made it very clear they would veto any attempt to interfere with the ongoing genocide. We up here got to get a very detailed account of what happened, because the commander of the UN force in the capital, the one who was asking for more troops to prevent it, the one that told the aid people to get out before they got chopped up, was a Canadian general named Romeo Dallaire. He stayed for the whole thing, and got a front row seat to the genocide, as well as to the manouveurings in New York that prevented any help being sent to him. He spoke at the Queen's University a few weeks ago... it was his last active posting, as it left him a broken man suffering from PTSD. He personally witnessed the murders of several thousand people. He said he felt he had to stay to at least be a witness to what happened, to be sure that there was a person who could say "this is what happened. I was there, and I saw it."

When I heard Fleischer talking about the UN and Rwanda, the only thing I could think of was what low down lying opportunistic scum you people have running your country. To be the spokesman for the office that prevented intervention in the Rwandan genocide and call it a failure of the UN so as to bolster their tattered claims of legitimacy in this war in the face of global opposition is to take historical revisionism to new depths unimagined by Orwell.

The fact that it was a democratic president vs a republican one matters not one whit; there is plenty of blood on hands on both sides of the aisle from your foreign policy.

Damn, wrong button.

Box, here are the questions I have. It's clear to everyone that the words spoken about Afghanistan are a far cry from what is actually being done in Afghanistan. An article about people fixing a road by hand doesn't change this at all. Why do you think it does?

What do you call an entity whose words are a far cry from their deeds?

Why would you expect anyone to trust said entity when they say they're going to do something when they have manifestly failed to do so in the very recent past?

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------

You know, there probably has been a house or two built. Of course, that still leaves the question of whether said houses were built with aid money. Also, let's not forget that roads != paved roads... and you can't build a paved road by hand.

While all that may be true, what is your actual opinion of what's going on? It's one thing to point out potential inconsistencies in some of the minutiae, but I think the broad trend is pretty clear. Do you think it will be different in Iraq? If so, why?

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------