Peter Beinart of The New Republic looks for the response of the Chomskyite left to the crises that have caused millions of deaths and horrible suffering in the Congo, Liberia, Sudan and Zimbabwe and finds– nothing.
As he observes, if there’s no reason to denounce US “imperialism,” these folks aren’t interested.
But Beinart doesn’t let the right off the hook:
The irony is that, in paying attention to Africa only when the United States wields power there, the hard left is not that different from the right. Once Africa was no longer a site of superpower competition, conservatives largely lost interest as well. Even today, most conservatives (with some honorable exceptions) oppose a Liberia intervention, which they deem “foreign policy as social work.” The right, which on Iraq and Cuba speaks in high moral tones, adopts a cold and narrow realism when it comes to Africa, where it blithely assumes … the United States has no interests.