because they're running out of black people to kill... http://www.slate.com/id/2129657/ -- Realism in Darfur Consider the horrors of peace. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:05 PM ET It looks as if the realists have won the day in the matter of Darfur. Or, to phrase it in another way, it looks as if the ethnic cleansers of that province have made good use of the "negotiation" and "mediation" period to complete their self-appointed task. As my friend Johann Hari put it recently in the London Independent: "At last, some good news from Darfur: the genocide in western Sudan is nearly over. There's only one problem—it's drawing to an end only because there are no black people left to cleanse or kill." By some reliable estimates, the Sudanese government or "National Islamic Front" has slain as many as 400,000 of its black co-religionists—known contemptuously as zurga ("******s")—and expelled perhaps 2 million more. This appalling achievement has been made possible by a very simple tactic: The actual killers and cleansers, the Arab janjaweed militias, are a "deniable" arm of the Sudanese authorities. Those authorities pretend to negotiate with the United Nations, the United States, and the African Union, and their negotiating "card" is the control that they can or might exercise over said militias. While this tap is turned on and off, according to different applications of carrot and stick, the militias pretend to go out of control and carry on with their slaughter and deportation. By the time the clock has been run out, the job is done. If it were not for the efforts of a few brave journalists and humanitarian workers, and at least one American soldier attached to the African Union "peacekeepers" who went public in disgust at what he had seen, the Sudanese government might have gotten away with the whole thing. But we have more than enough filmed and photographic evidence of Sudanese planes and helicopters, flying close support to janjaweed operations, to say with certainty that the relationship between the two is the same as between the Rwandan authorities and the "Hutu Power" mobs who destroyed the Tutsi population. In other words, a Rwanda in slow motion, and in front of the cameras and the diplomats. What was all that garbage about "never again"? What was the meaning of Clinton's apology to the Rwandans? What did Colin Powell mean when he finally used the word "genocide" to describe the events in Darfur, just before resigning as secretary of state and becoming an advocate for more realism all round? And what on earth was I thinking when I employed that "carrot and stick" cliché a couple of paragraphs above? Carrots there have been. Only the other day, according to the New York Times, the Bush administration granted a waiver to the sanctions ostensibly in place against the Khartoum government in order to allow it to spend $530,000 on a lobbyist in Washington. Well, one would not want to deny a government indicted for genocide the right to make its case. That would hardly be fair. Meanwhile, the State Department has upgraded Sudan's status on the chart that shows "cooperation" in the matter of slave-trafficking. Apparently, you can be on this list and still be awarded points for good behavior. A hundred-plus congressmen recently signed a statement accusing the administration of "appeasement," which seems the only appropriate word for it. But that's about the extent of the protest. How can this be? Surely the administration did everything that could have been asked of it. Abandoning any sort of "unilateralism," it pedantically followed the Kofi Annan script of multiparty negotiations and patient diplomacy. It allowed the inspectors more time. It exhausted all avenues short of war and never even threatened the use of force. By the use of sanctions, it kept Sudan "in its box." And it has got exactly what anyone might have predicted for such a strategy. Perhaps that's why there is so little protest. After all, we know that "war is not the answer." And now Sudan has Darfur province in its box. It has taken the land and gotten rid of the people. Any critique of realism has to begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace. Everybody now wishes, or at least says they wish, that we had not made ourselves complicit spectators in Rwanda. But what if it had been decided to take action? Only one member state of the U.N. Security Council would have had the capacity to act with speed to deploy pre-emptive force (and that would have been very necessary, given the weight of the French state, and the French veto, on the side of the genocidaires). It is a certainty that at some stage, American troops would have had to open fire on the "Hutu Power" mobs and militias, actually killing people and very probably getting killed in return. Body bags would have been involved. It is not an absolute certainty that all detained members of those militias would have been treated with unfailing tenderness. It is probable that some of the military contractors would have overcharged, and that some locals would have engaged in profiteering and even in tribal politics. It is impossible that any child of any member of the Clinton administration would have been an enlisted soldier. But we never had to suffer any of these wrenching experiences, so that we can continue to wish, in some parallel Utopian universe, that we had done something instead of nothing. Or not exactly nothing. The United States ended up supporting the French military intervention in Rwanda, which was mounted in an attempt not to remove the genocidaires but to save them. Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder. Thank heaven that we are tough enough to bear the shame of this, and strong enough to forgive ourselves.
Maybe the admin's bean counters calculated that the risk wasn't as great as the potential rewards for his cronies and the American people. They also decided to milk in the most out it by following the UN's script even if many of us have declared the UN "irrelevant". Odd...hmm? Heck, a lot of people here would've supported or stayed silent in a grizzly war against N. Korea. Any thoughts on that?
Somewhat off topic, but Hitchens doesn't understand that Rwanda isn't really a perfect fit as a case of straight-up ethnic A v. ethnic B genocide. Even in areas that were 99% Hutu or higher, obscene amounts of Hutu on hutu violence occurred, and not by marauding bands of outsiders but by residents of the areas. Another theory, credibly advanced in the book Collapse, by Jared Diamond, is that overpopulation pressures and limited resources (which have caused many societal disintegrations in the past) was the principal underlying (and overlooked) causes of that. I'm not sure as to it's applicability in the Darfur situation though.
it's not so odd really. the administration was excoriated by democrats, the liberal MSM, and old europe for "unilateral" action in iraq. in the Sudan, they've taken the collectivist route, with the predictable result that nothing has been accomplished, and hundres of thousands have died. i'm in no way excusing the administration for this course of (in)action, but they're not th eonly ones to blame here. re NK, a war aginst the north would be immensely more difficult than the war against iraq. there is the potential for immense civilian casualties in SK, and it would take a massive first strike to minimize this possibility. not to mention the probability NK has deliverable nuclear weapons. Bush has wisely, IMO, chosen a diplomatic route in dealing with the issue. as he's said, there is no one size fits all solution to rougue regimes. the NK situation is a mess, and there will be no perfect solution.
For a party that rails so often against the culture of victimization, Republicans sure are victimized by those minority Democrats all the time. You'd think a majority party would occasionally show some leadership instead of just blaming everyone else for its failures.
I don't disagree with this, but he is somewhat right that Sudan shows that waiting for the UN to act decisively is not necessarily the best criteria to follow as many on this bbs have suggested. That doesn't fail to assign responsibility on the Republicans for not acting.
Not anything like a NK/SK conflict. You'd easily be talking about millions of dead, a completely flattened Seoul, and possibly a nuked Japan. The military option for NK really wasn't a option unless NK was on the verge of invading SK again. Further, in NK there are three major powers on the doorstep: China, Russia and Japan. China and Russia are the only two countries with real influence in NK and Japan the most affected major power. Much better to use diplomacy than force in this instance. Totally different than the situation in Iraq where there is no major power to mediate, rebuke, or enforce.
the casualty rate in SK would be orders of magnitude beyond anything seen in iraq. keep in mind that the most reliable estimates of civilian deaths in iraq are between 10k-30k, not the 100k+ in the now thoroughly debunked lancet story. i don't mean to minimize iraqi civilian deaths, but saddam killed 20-30k of his own people every year, and attempted the wholesale extermination of particular populations. in any case, to the SK civilian deaths one would have to add those in NK. the situation is far different from iraq, or iran for that matter. i'd certainly like to see Kim dealt with, but i'm not sure a full scale american assault is the way to do it.
no one is saying its not different. of course it is. iraq didn't have a viable military. north korea does. but this attack against iraq has resulted in (not directly due to the US but given the invasion) tens of thousands of deaths. and frankly i consider those immense. just because another invasion might have been millions shouldn't lessen the immensity of this.
Well, I agree that simply waiting on the UN is not always the best course of action. Clinton has said many times that his biggest failure as President was Rwanda - I agree with that. That said, it's not like the US really pushed the UN to do anything. In this situation, the US was waiting on the UN instead of leading or guiding it.
I agree that the deaths in Iraq are significant. I don't think his comparison meant to trivialize that though, just to point out that the casualties in that scenario would be many multiples of what's happening in Iraq. True, I think we're generally in agreement on this. To be fair though we've floated resolutions in the UN to tighten sanctions in an effort to get the situation changed and put bilateral pressure on Sudan to do the same. I'm not sure what else the 'international community' is doing.
The UN and the international community are the ones that have workers and observers on the ground in Sudan now. That is not near enough, but we don't have that. I think we should have had folks on the ground giving us intel to prepare for a military intervention long ago.
of course we are. My point is that we didn't do anything on our own, and that is what the international community has done. I'm saying that we should have had military recon on the ground already.
We have done something on our own - submitting resolutions in the UN and bilateral pressure. We are part of the international effort as well.
I would hope we are part of it. I wasn't saying we weren't doing anything. In many respects we have been the most vocal about bringing attention to this. The question was what was the international community doing. I answered that. The fact that we are also involved with what is going in the international community doesn't mean they aren't doing anything. But I think we should be doing more, if that means going in unilaterally to stop the genocide then that is what must be done.
So how is unilateralism OK in this situation? I mean wasn't the problem with our intervention in Iraq (according to some) the fact that we did it alone and didn't get inspectors time to work? I guess my question is what/who is the determiner of the validity of unilateral action?
