Solve terrorism - kill them all !
A very disturbing article in the New Yorker about the Sri Lankan government campaign against the Tamil Tigers. Depending on who you ask, the Tigers were either freedom fighters or terrorists, but in either case, the government finally decided it had enough and so this is what it did.
It basically kicked out any journalist or NGO etc out of the north of the country and then proceeded to bomb the crap out of the Tamils - Tigers and civilians alike. It actually created "no fire zones" and told the civilians to seek refuge there and then bombed the crap out of the "no fire zones". So this is how they won the war.
A couple of things that are worth pondering that arise out of this...
One is that this strategy has one unanimous admiration from many military commanders in the West - it seems to be the most effective way of rooting out counter-insurgency.
Two - when the Western powers that be tried to set up various tribunals and investigations into possible war crimes, etc. Sri Lanka basically told them to go fuck themselves. They basically see China as the world power in the region, and could care less about what the USA or the UN think about their actions. Needless to say, China did not have strong objections to their methods of handling the Tamil Tigers.
Three - of course the hypocrisy of the world in ignoring this and standing by silently while at the same time treating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the next Holocaust.
It basically kicked out any journalist or NGO etc out of the north of the country and then proceeded to bomb the crap out of the Tamils - Tigers and civilians alike. It actually created "no fire zones" and told the civilians to seek refuge there and then bombed the crap out of the "no fire zones". So this is how they won the war.
A couple of things that are worth pondering that arise out of this...
One is that this strategy has one unanimous admiration from many military commanders in the West - it seems to be the most effective way of rooting out counter-insurgency.
Two - when the Western powers that be tried to set up various tribunals and investigations into possible war crimes, etc. Sri Lanka basically told them to go fuck themselves. They basically see China as the world power in the region, and could care less about what the USA or the UN think about their actions. Needless to say, China did not have strong objections to their methods of handling the Tamil Tigers.
Three - of course the hypocrisy of the world in ignoring this and standing by silently while at the same time treating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the next Holocaust.
posted by e-kvetcher at 2:45 PM
2 Comments:
Glad to see I'm not the only one recognizing both a moral failure and a double standard.
Double standard has become the norm...and there is no hope for change in that until the next election...and even then who knows.
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