As a white American southerner, I am disturbed on many levels when the reprehensible slavery of Africans in America over a century ago is still frequently brought up for political purposes. The truth is that slavery still exists and is widespread today in Africa itself, where it is unfortunately almost totally ignored by Americans today, both white and black. At this very moment, there are black slaves digging up diamonds for next year’s Valentine’s Day bling in a brutal business called conflict diamonds. The political instability of Africa makes it a hotbed of seemingly endless civil wars which are extremely expensive to fight. Financing such evil adventures is easy when you’ve got a herd of slaves in your back pocket digging in the dirt for shiny rocks that Westerners will pay a fortune to buy and sell at ever more inflated prices.
This is the main reason I am not and will never be swayed by the argument that “even if we didn’t find WMDs that were threatening America in Iraq, toppling Saddam was a worthy effort because it helped so many brutalized innocent Iraqis.” Not to detract one iota from innocent Iraqis who were indeed well and truly brutalized, I say that if you want to see true brutalization of innocents, start reading about what’s going on in Africa right now. Who knows the truth is about the covert American input into this mess? I sure don’t.
Here’s how I see it: America sends in 100,000+ troops to storm a Middle Eastern country that’s literally dripping with oil, but when an African conflict shows up that’s easy for Americans to reach, President Bush parks only 2000 Marines offshore in a troop transport, lets only a few of them hit the beach, then immediately pulls them back out because those tough leatherneck Marines can’t take for a week what African babies have to live through every day of their lives. Then Sheriff Dubya lets the perp walk and we never hear about it again; guess it served its political purpose of distraction. There are so many things wrong with that picture I need a calculator to count them all.
Somebody should inform Dubya that conflict diamonds have financed $20 million of Al-Qaida operations, something Saddam never did. Then maybe we’d pour 100,000 American save-the-brutalized-innocents troops into Angola and Congo instead of Iraq. They still wouldn’t be in Afghanistan where they belong hunting Osama Bin Laden, but at least they’d be doing SOMETHING that at least HAMPERS Al-Qaida. Unlike now.