COMMENT
JUST WATCHING
Issue of 2006-06-12
Posted 2006-06-05
In a reflective moment shortly before Memorial Day, President Bush told reporters that he had come to regret the “tough talk” he used when taking the country to war. He rued tagging Osama bin Laden with the phrase “wanted dead or alive” and taunting Iraqi insurgents to “bring it on.” The fight has not gone so simply, and, he said, “I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner.” The President’s wartime woes are hardly limited to his rhetoric, but as long as he is calling his own bluff it’s worth remembering another line of foreign-policy swagger. Shortly after Bush took office, an adviser gave him a report on the Clinton Administration’s policy of inaction during the Rwandan genocide, and on it the President wrote, “Not on my watch!” Those words have now been taken up as the rallying cry of America’s anti-genocide movement—a loose, bipartisan coalition of students, human-rights professionals, church groups, editorial writers, professors, movie stars, and a few elected officials—which advocates immediate military action to stop the killing in the Darfur region of Sudan.
There is something absurdist about the existence of an anti-genocide movement. For any other anti-something campaign (anti-war, anti-tax, anti-porn), there is an opposing force (the hawks, the tax-hikers, the pornographers), while nobody, of course, is stumping for genocide. To declare oneself against it is a safe bet, even in a case as complicated as that of Darfur, a civil-war-ravaged patch of the Sahara, where many political factors and military factions have contributed to the anguish. Yet it has never been the American way to venture abroad to stop mass slaughter by force. We entered the Second World War nearly three years into the fight, and then not to save Europe’s Jews but in response to a direct attack on our territory and, ultimately, to repel Fascist aggression. We did not save Cambodia from itself, and did nothing while eight hundred thousand Rwandans were killed. And, when Europe was again disfigured by concentration camps and ethnic cleansing, in the Balkans, we waited for years before pacifying Bosnia and, later, Kosovo with aerial bombardments. (Even then, the logic was as much strategic—to bring a defiant dictator to heel and restore order on nato’s turf—as it was humanitarian.) We have not sent forces into Congo, although it has been riddled with massacres in the past decade, nor did we send troops to southern Sudan during the civil war there that claimed more than a million lives in the past two decades.
So it is not surprising that we have stayed out of Darfur. That, truly, is Rwanda’s lesson: endangered peoples who depend on us for their salvation stand undefended. President Clinton has said that he regrets not protecting Rwanda, but during the 2000 Presidential campaign Bush identified the decision as one of the few Clinton policies he approved of. “I think the Administration did the right thing in that case,” he said. “It was a horrible situation, no one liked to see it on our TV screens, but . . . I thought they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops.” After the election, Bush apparently changed his attitude, and, after the invasion of Iraq—once it became clear that no weapons of mass destruction were to be found—he took to explaining the war as just the sort of humanitarian, nation-building mission that he had campaigned against. But, despite the universalist rhetoric, when both sides in Liberia’s decades-old civil war pleaded, in the summer of 2003, for American intervention, the President refused their appeal.
The killing in Darfur began that year. No precise casualty figures exist, but the janjaweed militias sponsored by the Sudanese government are reported to have killed hundreds of thousands of people, raped a great many of the women they left alive, and driven some two million from their homes to live—and to be hunted—in desert refugee camps, where potable water is scarce and disease widespread. Despite the Sudanese government’s acceptance of a cease-fire agreement last month, the violence has continued apace. The only outside force that has been allowed into the conflict zone is a monitoring mission from the African Union, composed of seven thousand relatively poorly equipped soldiers, who are under orders only to observe the terror and not take any action to stop it. Now there are plans to deploy as many as twenty thousand United Nations peacekeeping troops to Darfur at the end of this year. It is not clear that the Sudanese will permit such a force or that the U.N. can muster it—but, assuming that it happens, this is a decidedly lax timetable in the face of a steadily mounting death toll.
Given the Bush Administration’s contempt for the U.N., and the U.N.’s own dysfunction, it is a measure of how low Darfur’s situation ranks among the Administration’s priorities that it is willing to let the Security Council handle it. And it is a measure of how forsaken Darfur is that Bush has been more actively engaged with its crisis than many Western leaders. (Last month, when the World Food Program, finding itself strapped for funds, cut food rations for Darfuri refugees, Bush noted that the United States, unlike other nations, had met its financial commitment.) Still, one can’t help thinking that the words “Not on my watch” originally carried a bigger promise.
The interventionist impulse—whether it is espoused by liberal humanitarians or neocon hawks—is not much in favor these days. Anti-genocide activists argue that Darfuris should not be made to pay for mistakes made in Iraq, and that “saving Darfur” can redeem America’s international honor. But how do we know that, if we take action, we will do the right thing and do it successfully? “Tough talk” aside, Darfur presents no more of a cakewalk than Iraq did. A major ground invasion would be required to stop the janjaweed’s horse- and camel-mounted killers—and advocates of intervention insist that air power would be needed as well. There are dozens of ethnic groups in Darfur, and at least three fractious rebel movements, in addition to the janjaweed, the Army, and the Air Force, and it is not clear which of them would be on our side, or whose side we would want to be on. To further complicate matters, the Bush Administration has cultivated the Sudanese regime (once host to bin Laden and Al Qaeda) as one of its unlikely new allies in the war on terror, and Washington has long supported the dictatorship in neighboring Chad, which is in a state of increasingly open conflict with Sudan.
At such times in the past, we turned to the community of nations, and although that proved, for the most part, a disappointing instrument, it is even more unsettling to find ourselves led by an Administration whose incompetent unilateralism has weakened America’s influence around the world. As the catastrophe in Darfur confronts us with the limitations of our power, the idea of a common international humanity appears as remote as ever.
COMMENT
THE FINANCIAL PAGE
— Philip Gourevitch
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