Secretary of the World, Hillary Clinton is telling yet another foreign leader that "he must step down".
Immediately.
Yes, folks, this time it's the turn of Ivory Coast (Cote d'Ivoire) President For Life Laurent Gbagbo to feel the wrath of the Little Woman in the Pants Suit.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/04/03/clinton-concerned-ivory-coast-violence-calls-election-loser-step/?test=latestnews
And what has Mr Gbagbo done to incur the wrath of Madame Secretary? Some small little affront-like refusing to acknowledge the results of an election he lost. And now, some 1,000 Ivoirians have been killed in the resultant fighting. You know what that means, don't you?
The Obama Doctrine. (Anytime, a people is in danger from its own government, we will act.)
I told you the Ivory Coast was next. So the next step is that we will join an international coalition under the leadership of France (The Leader of the Free World) and the African Union to enforce a no-fly zone, launch some missiles into Abidjan and see what happens.
But wait a minute!
"But after hundreds were reported dead in a neighborhood controlled by pro-Ouattara forces, Clinton said those loyal to him must respect the rules of war and stop attacks on civilians.
"President Ouattara's troops must live up to the ideals and vision articulated by their elected leader.
"At the same time, we call on the UN peacekeeping mission to aggressively enforce its mandate to protect civilians," Clinton said. "As President Ouattara takes the reins of government, he must prevent his troops from carrying out reprisals and revenge attacks against their former foes."
So Clinton says that Gbagbo must step down immediately, but the massacres have apparently been carried out by opposition forces. Which side are we going to bomb? Well, as Mel Brooks once said...
"To be or not to be."
"I don't think that's funny."
Here's a geography quiz for all you Community Studies majors at UC-Santa Cruz (America's Wackiest University).
The Ivory Coast is located..
a- on the west coast of California
b- on the west coast of Africa
c- on the southern coast of Canada
d- on the northern coast of South America
e- on the beachfront home of the Elephant Man
Give up? OK, the answer is b.
Meanwhile, Barack Obama is reported to be meeting with his advisors in the Situation Room trying to figure out who's going to win the NCAA Final Monday night. (That's Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room.)
"Now that's funny!"
The Gary Fouse doctrine:
ReplyDelete"Hey, I love dictators as long as they're not Muslim. There is no way that the United States of America should do ANYTHING to encourage respect for free elections. Tyrants are entitled to stay in office with impunity after losing an election. That's life."
"P.S. If the Obama administration did it, there must be something wrong with it. If my kind of candidate gets elected, then maybe it would be OK."
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteThe Fouse doctrine is that democracy is great, but it is not our role to make sure every nation has it. If you can make sense out of what we are doing in Lidya-or what position we are taking in Cote D'Ivoire, you are the wisest man in the world.
Thank you Gary, I don't think I deserve that attribution, any more than Barack Obama thought he had earned the Nobel Peace Prize (he said so in writing, in the email he sent out to the entire OFA database the night it was announced), but I appreciate any compliment from a worthy opponent such as yourself.
ReplyDeleteThe situation in the Ivory Coast is rather like that in the former Yugoslavia, which followed a similar cycle of political systems failing, rising violence with civilians often the victims and an international community for a long period only willing to take very limited steps in the face of a humanitarian disaster and likely war crimes.
ReplyDeleteNo its not. The Ivory Coast just had an election, which surprised observers by NOT splitting strictly along ethnic lines.
ReplyDeleteYugoslavia was a federation of at least six distinct and recognized nationalities, which sundered themselves from each other, after fifty years of freely mixing in each other's territories, and drawing boundaries that were stable only on the presumption of a federal union.
"Communism was very bad. If it wasn't for communism, we could have been engaged in ethnic cleansing years ago."