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- Xref: sparky alt.current-events.somalia:717 alt.politics.org.un:210 alt.president.clinton:1238 talk.politics.misc:65125 alt.politics.bush:14869
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- From: yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin)
- Newsgroups: alt.current-events.somalia,alt.politics.org.un,alt.president.clinton,talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.bush
- Subject: Re: Somalia
- Message-ID: <1h7q17INNbaa@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU>
- Date: 22 Dec 92 19:24:23 GMT
- References: <1992Dec22.003246.17522@news.columbia.edu> <1h5vnrINN9f2@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU> <1992Dec22.035734.24397@news.columbia.edu>
- Organization: Yale Computer Science Department
- Lines: 27
- NNTP-Posting-Host: cathy.na.cs.yale.edu
-
- egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy) writes:
- >In article <1h5vnrINN9f2@CATHY.NA.CS.YALE.EDU> yarvin@cs.yale.edu (Norman Yarvin) writes:
- >> Thus the mission will succeed, in the sense that it will achieve,
- >>with few casualties, the goal set out for it.
- >
- >No, the mission will fail in the long-term because the relief workers
- >may not be sufficiently protected after we leave (depending on UN
- >deployments). If you want success without some sort of disarmament,
- >then we may well be there for quite a while.
-
- In other words: the mission will fail after the mission ends. However the
- mission has no goals set beyond the time of its departure, so it could hardly
- fail in the sense of trying to accomplish something and not succeeding.
-
- It may fail in the sense of trying to accomplish something and succeeding,
- yet falling short of the media's definition of success. Sort of like the
- Gulf War. It improved the situation, but it did not solve every single
- problem in the region.
-
- The situation is so bad in Somalia that it would take immense effort to
- rectify, if indeed such a thing is possible. Providing food may even be a
- step in the wrong direction, since it encourages starving farmers to
- converge on the cities. But this, if a flaw, is a flaw of the relief
- mission itself rather than of the efforts to protect it.
-
- --
- Norman Yarvin yarvin@cs.yale.edu
-