FreeSpeech.com

The Sudan:

Well, it finally happened. One of the conspiracy theorists has finally spouted off on the Sudan. It happened over at Del's FreeSpeech:

By the way...Soudan is everyday looking like another Rwanda....where are the good american- peace- reatoring-soldiers...???

Aahhhhh [expletive -- see how the bracket thing works? -Grim] ...I should have known better...THERE IS NO OIL IN SOUDAN !!!!

There actually is quite a bit of oil in the Sudan. In fact, control over the oil and its revenue is the main thing the Sudanese are fighting over.

The oilfields are in the South of Sudan, which is primarily Christian and animist by faith; but the export facilities are all in the north, which is under the control of the Muslim militants.

These last, it should be remembered, are not the legitimate government of Sudan -- they violently overthrew the legitimate government, and established control over the North by force. Now they are trying to do the same to the South, precisely because they can't afford secession by the region which has all the oil.

Both sides are trying to bill this as a contest between religions, and to some degree that's true -- but not to a very large degree. The agitation for the Sha'riah law in the North of Sudan, for example, comes mostly from the populace rather than from the militants who control the area. The populace, which by and large recognizes these militants for the thugs that they are, wants a Sha'riah system because it removes judicial control from the militants, and places it instead in the hands of local imams everyone knows and trusts.

The South is resisting the Sha'riah because they aren't Muslims, and want to be independent. The ethnic cleansing is an attempt to destroy the groups that want independence -- which happens to be the Christians and the animists. But the war in Sudan really is all about oil, or at least, the great majority of it is.

So my question to you: if the US is a Crusader power, that is runs its foreign policy based on oil, why aren't we already in Sudan? We could deal a defeat to a Muslim state, erect a Christian one in the South, and then build ourselves an oil pipeline that would give us sole control of the Sudanese oil fields -- a rather nicer deal for us than that mythical Afghanistan pipeline that we supposedly want, but somehow never get around to building. The UN might even applaud us for our actions in the Sudan.

So why aren't we?