The Bait and Switch

Yesterday's blog was a Movie Quote Quiz.  And I promised you the answers in today's blog.  Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, I stumbled upon an article in The Telegraph.  The Telegraph, for those of you don't know, is a newspaper from London, England.  Notice that this news hasn't hit any of the major American media outlets.  Yet.

The significance of this, and the reason why today's blog won't include the answers (check back tomorrow for the quiz answers), is that the Telegraph is reporting on something that I blogged about last week, the upcoming vote in southern Sudan.  As some commenters pointed out on my earlier blog, Sudan isn't as rich in natural resources as Iraq or Kuwait.  The article says that southern Sudan actually produces 480,000 barrels of oil a day.  A day!

That could be its saving grace.  Either because of the oil in southern Sudan or because the United States wants to avoid another Rwanda (I'm betting on the former), the State Department formed the U.S. Civilian Response Corps, which is currently building a large presence in southern Sudan.  They are there to "observe, report and monitor".

As I mentioned in my earlier blog about southern Sudan, the Anglican Bishop of Sudan spent time at our parish when he was just a priest from the Diocese of Renk in southern Sudan, before he became the Bishop of Renk and then the Bishop of Sudan.  Now the Archbishop of Canterbury warns that the world risks "sleepwalking" into another disaster like Rwanda. 

It's amazing to me, and a very sad indictment of the world, that it could be southern Sudan's oil reserves that save its people, rather than humanitarian concerns of saving lives just to save lives.