Guest Post by Michael J.W. Stickings
Yesterday witnessed the Rally to Stop Genocide, a significant if relatively small protest held on the Mall in Washington. The Post reports:
Clutching signs that read “Never Again,” thousands of protesters from across religious and political divides descended on the Mall yesterday along with celebrities and politicians to urge President Bush to take stronger measures to end the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region that the United States has labeled genocide.
They wore skullcaps, turbans, headscarves, yarmulkes, baseball hats and bandanas. There were pastors, rabbis, imams, youths from churches and youths from synagogues. They cried out phrases in Arabic and held signs in Hebrew. But on this day, they said, they didn’t come out as Jews or Muslims, Christians or Sikhs, Republicans or Democrats.
They came out as one, they said, to demand that the Bush administration place additional sanctions on Sudan and push harder for a multinational peacekeeping force to be sent to Darfur.
Only — “only” — 10,000 to 15,000 people may have turned out, far less than for rallies in support of sexier causes, but it “was the largest public outcry for Darfur since the conflict began three years ago”. Similar protests are “planned in 17 other cities”.
I fully agree that something must be done and I applaud this moral outrage. There has been far too little of it. This is why I admire, and am a member of, the Coalition for Darfur (go there for all the latest news).
But what to do exactly? Would a multinational peacekeeping force be at all effective? Who would lead it? Who would fund it? Would it operate solely in Darfur, or would it be permitted to cross over into Chad? Would it be responsible for protecting refugees, for repelling the Sudanese militias, for establishing order? Would it involve itself in the ongoing civil war? — the ones in both Chad and the Sudan, the ones that are so interlocked. How do you even keep the peace when there’s genocide going on? Indeed, there’s simply no peace to keep!
The Save Darfur Coalition would like to see the African Union assume the lead in Darfur. Or perhaps the United Nations. But, as Lawrence Kaplan put it recently at The New Republic, what is most needed is U.S. military power: “[W]ill 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.”
Call me a liberal interventionist with an excessively optimistic view of American power, but I tend to agree. This doesn’t mean that the U.S. should act unilaterally or without due regard for international institutions — we all know what quagmires come of that. However, I just don’t see any other option. If we want to do something about Darfur, and not just talk about doing something, we need to accept the fact that only the U.S. can do it. Or, at least, only a coalition of forces led by the U.S.
Otherwise, I’m afraid, all we’ll have are our “virtue and good intentions,” as Kaplan put it.
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Alas, this raises some tough questions: Is the U.S. prepared to send a military force to Darfur? Probably not, at least not one large enough to do much good. The military is already bogged down in Iraq, Iran is looming as the next target, and, of course, Bush simply has no credibility left. Could he possibly rally Americans in support of a sustained military campaign in Darfur given the memories of Somalia, the lack of immediate national interest, and the potential for significant casualties?