The two countries have a real difference of opinion over the border, and they have had two years of intermittent fighting. The launching of a third round of military activity by Ethiopia in the midst of the famine besetting a quarter of its own people is really heartbreaking and tragic. The food is piling up at the docks at Djibouti. It's not being let in through the Eritrean ports. These differences could have and should have been settled through the negotiating process that the organization of African Unity, the OAU, had set into motion.
All wars are terrible, but some wars are unavoidable.
This was a senseless, avoidable war. But in the end, after the breakdown of the OAU talks in Algiers, which took place before our Security Council mission got involved, they were hell-bent on going forward with this war. And they are now having an extraordinary and totally meaningless military conflict. You were pretty adamant earlier that the Economist , perhaps ironic, perhaps otherwise, was wrong. This is not a hopeless continent.