And So It Goes

While we all struggle to come to grips with the twin news stories of the economy and the election, it's easy to lose track of stories that will affect our news in years to come:

N'DJAMENA (Reuters) - Chadian rebels seeking to overthrow President Idriss Deby battled their way into the capital N'Djamena on Saturday and fought government troops around the presidential palace, diplomats and residents said.

The sound of machine gun and heavy weapons fire could be heard in the capital as foreign embassies advised their citizens to stay in doors and take cover. Fighting was reported to be taking place around the presidential palace and the parliament.

"I can confirm they (the rebels) are in the city," a foreign diplomat told Reuters. The situation was confused and mobile phone networks were not working.

"Rebels are headed for the palace and are about two blocks from here. The rebels are winning," one foreign resident said in an email sent from the compound of a western embassy in N'Djamena, adding she could hear tank and mortar fire.

OK, it's, you know, Chad! What's that got to do with the price of eggs?

Well, nothing today, but...

Chad says the rebels, who advanced rapidly this week across the country from the eastern border with Sudan's war-torn Darfur region, are armed and backed by the Sudanese government. Khartoum routinely denies such accusations.

Now, scroll back, say, twelve years and substitute Afghanistan for Chad.

That's the kind of trouble this could conceivably foment for us. The Darfur region of the Sudan is beset by Arab Islamist fundamentalists (the Janjaweed) who are attempting to drive out the ethnic Africans.

It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see what happens next: Al Qaeda and its wealthy patricians ask for and are granted asylum in Darfur, Chad and neighboring regions as the Janjaweed press their "influence" outward, backed by the Sudanese government, possibly cutting a deal with Qaddaffi as well.

This would give Al Qaeda a base of operations within striking distance of Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Egypt, and yes, Israel. Iran and Syria on one side. Al Qaeda supported by Sudan on the other, and then the fist closes on the Middle East.

Where's the uproar from the rabidly anti-Islamist right in this country? Where are the more Zionist neo-cons like Pamela "Atl-ass" Geller, always screeching about Israel's security, yet never saying word one about how we have squandered our military and financial resources fighting a war against people who once looked to us as an example of what it means to be free? Where's the "you're either with us or with the terrorists" bravado of 2002?

We on the left have been screaming about the tragedy of Darfur, yet here's a strategic as well as humanitarian crisis, and all this administration can do is embarrassedly clear their throats and mutter vague words of support for some nebulous United Nations attempt at putting a band-aid on a fracture.

Truly, "and so it goes.." until it is gone and too late.

African Idiot

Quietly, almost unnoticed in America save for the occasion commercial about Darfur, Africa is slipping away. Despite Dumbya's assertions that Africa wll live "in liberty, peace, and growing prosperity," it doesn't look promising:

By my count, that's three wars (four if you count the nascent violence in Sierra Leone), economies in shambles in the DR Congo, Nigeria, and Somalia, and the prince who might ride in and save the continent is...Muammar Ghaddafi?!?!?!?!?

Heck of a job, Bushie!

In fairness, Ghaddafi, when oil prices have been firm, has been generous to his African neighbors and now that oil is reaching record prices, I'm sure he sees an opportunity to engage in a little economic hegemony of his own.

The Bush administration was so desperate for any good news in the wake of September 11 and the bungled Iraq invasion that it embraced Ghaddafi's offer to surrender his weapons programs to inspectors, a move he had originally committed to under the Clinton administration, which rightly laughed at the offer. Ghaddafi? WMDs?

Ghaddafi had a strategy, of course: Al Qaeda would eventually target Libya and Ghaddafi himself, so by ingratiating with the US, he could ask for military assistance. And of course, the Bushies were forced to embrace it, even if it made but a ripple in the news.

And it turned out that Ghaddafi did have a (very) small scale weapons program going on, mostly chemical and biological, but an embryonic attempt to develop nukes was in the works. Whether he would have seriously pursued these, or if this all was an elaborate shell game to try to wring some concessions from the West in terms of sanctions, we may never know. He did, however, get the concessions. But not the lifting of sanctions, since he had threatened to kill anyone who wanted regime change, shortly after the US offered to lift the sanctions for basically, errrr, just that.

Ghaddafi had tried to unify OPEC and the Arab world behind him, and failed (and then oil tanked). He'd have more success in Africa, to be sure.

Add to Africa's manmade struggles the growing environmental crises: extreme drought in Darfur and Nigeria caused by global warming, as well as flooding in DR Congo...put it this way: when the good news of an entire continent can be summed up with a story about a rugby team defeating an English side in a preliminary tournament game, you have a deeply troubled continent.