To Kill the Fish, Drain the Sea

In addition to buying weapons (in defiance of UN sanction) from North Korea, Ethiopia has also decided that starving rebel regions is appropriate behavior:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

While I’m sure that “More Rubble, Less Trouble” Reynolds and Ralph Peters believe that this is a great (the only!) way to deal with rebel groups, I’d like to think that the US should be reluctant to support countries that intentionally starve significant elements of their population. Maybe I’m overly hung up on moral clarity, but sending weapons and investing in a quasi-alliance with a state that would engage in such tactics seems, well, bad.

I mean, really, it doesn’t occur to anyone that it might be a bad thing to support a country that invades its neighbors, brutally oppresses ethnic minorities, and defies the international community? Or should we simply think of this as laying the groundwork for a US led “war of liberation” in 2020, or so?