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The GW Hatchet

AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SERVING THE GW COMMUNITY SINCE 1904

The GW Hatchet

Serving the GW Community since 1904

The GW Hatchet

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Officials name senior vice president, chief of staff
By Fiona Riley, Assistant News Editor • March 26, 2024

Containing conflict

One of the clearest arguments in for favor of intervention was spoken nearly sixty years ago by a Haitian diplomat at the League of Nations in 1935. He said, All nations of the world, big or small, weak or mighty, we must act now or one day we will be somebody’s Ethiopia.

Very simply it is prudent to intervene early in inter- and intrastate conflicts, for both practical and moral reasons. The first reason is that it is easier to put out a small fire than a large conflagration. Had the allies acted in Munich in 1938, we may not have had to fight World War II, or perhaps it might not have been so catastrophic. America’s early intervention in Kosovo in the spring of 1999 prevented more than one million refugees from becoming corpses. The U.S. actions also avoided what would have been a regional disaster with neighboring nations intervening and fighting amongst themselves, the permanent displacement of millions of refugees and a shattered European economy.

Intervention is the smartest course of action, and it is the most moral course of action. How can the greatest of all nations, with its unlimited power and resources, stand by while people in the Balkans, all over Africa, in East Timor and all over the world are massacred because of who they are and what they believe? The United States has the power to prevent genocide, famine and destructive wars, and it should use this power. I beg you to look at Central Africa where early U.S. or other foreign intervention could have easily prevented nearly one million deaths, a war engulfing eight nations and untold suffering.

-David Kay
sophomore

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