More on Sudan
The United States will eventually act on Darfur. After the election president Bush or President Kerry will not sit idly by and permit a second genocide in Africa in a decade. We will intervene – belatedly. The question is how belatedly, and how effectively.This is indeed the question. The Bush administration could act now. A Kerry administration will not be able to act until January, and then only if their transition is smooth enough to allow them to instigate foreign policy initiatives, assuming the Bush administration is still dilly-dallying while Africans die. By the time action comes we may be patting ourselves on the back even as the worst of it is over. As we saw in Rwanda in 1994, cycles of genocide can play out in days and weeks rather than months. We have already allowed months to pass.
I would not place much faith in the United Nations, even with the Security Council’s recent resolution threatening Sudan with oil sanctions and ordering the ever-intimidating inquiry into whether genocide has occurred in Darfur or elsewhere. (I have conducted my own inquiry, and have come up with two possible answers: 1) Yes. 2) If you have to ask, you have to act.) Khartoum has responded, naturally, by labeling the Security Council resolution as being ”unfair.” As Kristol and Serchuck point out, the Security Council resolution will likely not follow with any troop action on the ground. Both China and Russia have cozy relationships with the Sudanese government and will not be willing to jeopardize those relationships for the sake of something like human rights or genocide.
They also argue that we have strategic interests in the Sudan, (something I have tried to argue on several occasions before, including in an HNN article back in November 2003, albeit more about policy toward Africa broadly, and in a different context). Sudan has ties to major terrorist organizations across the Middle East, is one of the seven countries on the US’s list of state sponsors of terror, and is a hotbed of Islamofascism, the genocide within the country’s midst being just the most obvious example.
All of this said, we may, then, have to go it alone. For all of the horrors of Beslan, horrors that ought to have opened Russian eyes about the moral corruptness inherent in cozying up to terrorists and the states who love them, it looks as if they and the ever intractable Chinese regime will stand in the way of the UN action so romanticized by those who hate the idea of America going it alone. But if go it alone we must, and if the UN will not or cannot act, I hope that we will have the support of even the UN’s staunchest, sometimes blindest, supporters.