Posted on 04/29/2006 7:57:56 PM PDT by Zack Nguyen
Nearly two years ago I attended a lecture by Samantha Power, author of "A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide" (a book I highly recommend), at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. She spoke on the same day the government of Sudan got a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission. On the negotiations to end the killing in Darfur, Power warned that peace talks are sometimes just cover so nations can look the other way at atrocious behavior. But how do you stop such behavior before it becomes a full-blown genocide and once it does how do you end it before eveyone is murdered or displaced? She answered that what is missing in Darfur, as it was in the Balkans and Rwanda, is the "political will" of the international community to act. Though, citing Iraq, she rejected a "militant unilateralist" approach in favor of a reformed UN armed with a robust force ready to intervene to prevent more Rwandas. This brings me to the superb piece, Crisis Intervention: Iraq, Darfur, and American Power, by The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan. He writes:
"Springtime has arrived on the nation's college campuses, but this year the students out marching in the streets are demanding a foreign intervention rather than protesting one. For months now they've been in full cry, and rightly so, over the international community's disinclination to halt the genocide in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Next Sunday, they and like-minded people around the United States will convene for a massive rally in the nation's capital.
But the marchers will have to contend with an unwelcome guest: the specter of Iraq....
Then again, the use of unilateral U.S. military power isn't the solution most Darfur activists have in mind. Even as western Sudan burns, Darfur advocates such as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi argue that the United States must employ its military power only on behalf of--and, more important, in concert with--international organizations such as the United Nations. The Save Darfur Coalition, a leading umbrella group for organizations bent on action, intends to save Darfur not by urging the Bush administration to launch air strikes against Sudan's murderous militias but by petitioning the White House to bolster funding for African Union peacekeepers and to lobby the United Nations.
But will the African Union put a halt to the killings in Darfur? Absolutely not. Its Arab members have stymied the force at every turn. Will the United Nations solve the crisis? That seems extremely unlikely as well. The organization amounts first and foremost to a collection of sovereign states, many of them adamantly opposed to violating Sudan's own sovereignty. Can NATO save the day? Not really, given the fears of entanglement expressed by its European members. As in Bosnia before it, the victims of Darfur can be saved by one thing and one thing alone: American power.
Unfortunately for the victims of Darfur, too many of their advocates have come to view that power as tainted, marred by self-interest and by its misapplication in Iraq. Hence, the contradiction at the heart of the Darfur debate, which pits the imperative to halt the persecution of innocents (Darfur activists have enshrined as their motto the biblical admonition not to "stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor") against a reflexive opposition to the only power that can actually do so.
With the latter sentiment in vogue as a result of the Iraq war, it is as if nothing has been learned and nothing remembered from the decade that went before. Never mind Bosnia. Never mind Kosovo. And, as long as Darfur activists like number two Senate Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois cling to the mantra that the United States must be what he calls a "defensive nation," well, never mind Darfur either."
Interestingly, former Clinton official Richard Holbrooke has separated himself from Democrats like Durbin, who have adopted the language of foreign policy "realists." Too bad Durbin and company aren't listening.
If anyone cares about saving Darfur, every Muslim in Sudan must start believing in Christianity and the Trinity. Now, whether that comes before or after death is entirely up to the individual....but this would be a good place to harden some green recruits before shipping them to tighter spots.
This is the kind of war liberals love as it feeds their egos and has little to do with protecting American interests. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2008 we'll be invading Sudan under direction of the UN. This will probably lead to thousands of American soldiers dead from leftist mismanagement. Black Hawk Down, here we go again.
I don't believe in Christianity, nor the trinity.
Yet I don't enslave blacks, like the blacks in Sudan do.
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
In watching the rally today, I heard a leftist speaker utter a phrase that indicates the disconnect. "The most important thing we have to do to stop the genocide is protect the people".
Well.. yeah.
Step One on rejoining the real world completed. Now all she has to do is figure out how to protect the people in a way that doesn't involve using force.
Maybe if she saved up her leftist demonstration transportation costs, she could buy the entire non-islamist population a nice island somewhere.
I'd also be willing to bet you don't run around advising people who agree with you on religion to "strike the necks of the infidels" as the best way to settle theological matters.
Uhmm, have you actually met a Darfurian? I met a Darfurian American living in Brooklyn last year and his family was all Muslim. Most of them had been killed by the Janjaweed. This guy was African, not Arab, fyi. So don't be spreading around unsubstantiated myths.
I find it interesting the left has just noticed this. I assume the Christians have been killed off?/sarcasm
I can't believe the left would want to save Christians. Conservatives have been working on this issue for years. Problem is, world doesn't want to do anything, and for a while at least, didn't want the US to either. Now that Clooney and his fellow travelers have made this the hip genocide, I h=guess the world will expect us to deal with it, always criticizing us in the process. I just wonder why the left is on this subject now.
The Janjaweed is just another group of Muslim thugs preying on other Muslims, all in the name of Allah.
I know Darfur has Africans who are Muslim, but Muslim in a way that is very heretical to the Wahabbi.
Any reasonable person can see false religion is at the heart of the problem, compounded by race, tribalism and socialism though it may be.
Just what unsubstantiated myth was I spreading, anyhow?
Sorry, I completely misunderstood one of your posts. I've heard the myth that the victims in Darfur are Chritians from many people lately. I was just a bit paranoid and interpreted one of your posts as propogating that same myth.
No, that's for the theological folks.
There are very few Christians in Darfur, mainly because the Black Muslims, who are now being persecuted by Arab Muslims, had already applied the same sort of treatment to the Christians. As recently as 2O years ago, southern Sudan had a large Christian population.
I disagree. The leftists are now the "realists" of foreign policy, and they will not commit U.S. troops to a war, especially when they are likely to lose their base over it.
Yes, and that is puzzling. Are they so uncomfortable with the defense of their own country? With the assertion of national interests? Yet they are comfortable with foreign "meddling" as it were in countries in which there is no national interest. (Having said that, I'd like to see a more robust presence by the U.S. in Darfur. But then I was in favor of the Iraq war too.)
I confused the "civil war" with what is going on now (which was Arab Muslims in the N against African Christians & Animists in the S - Darfur is the W of the Sudan), though I still wonder why the left is so concerned now.
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