The main point of his argument, that it’s questionable as to whether or not what has been happening in Sudan is actually “genocide” or not, is one I’ve argued for more than a year. (I’ve always contended that, ignoring attempts to put nice and neat boundaries on things, what we have is more intertribal warfare-cum-civil war than out-and-out genocide.
Here’s his take on the situation:
Yes, in the United States, it is universally believed — so much so that the claim is even enshrined in a unanimous congressional declaration — that a slow-motion genocide has been taking place in Darfur. But many reputable groups abroad, including the French section of Doctors Without Borders, whose physicians have been on the ground in Darfur for a very long time, reject those claims.
Does this matter, since everyone agrees the government of Sudan has committed or abetted the most terrible crimes in Darfur? On the most obvious level, the answer is no. The Genocide Convention is itself a deeply flawed document, and the crimes of the authorities in Khartoum have been unspeakable.
But, on another level, the recurrent use of the term “genocide” is a way of delegitimizing any questioning of the intervene-now-no-matter-the-cost line. We failed to intervene in Rwanda, and now we know we were wrong; Darfur is the Rwanda of today; hence the only correct thing to do is intervene at once in Darfur. Q.E.D.
But Rieff goes beyond that. He pointedly underscores the idea that many interventionist liberals are looking for an “offset” for not having backed the invasion of Iraq. Beyond that, he asks why haven’t these interventionist liberals learned the lessons of Iraq?
From there, he says that, even if intervention is warranted, we have no chance of doing well in leading it,
“without even the fig leaf of a U.N. Security Council authorization."
To the contrary, there is a good case to be made that the United States is the last country that should be leading an international operation in Darfur.
To put the matter starkly, the United States no longer enjoys enough moral credibility in the world as a whole to intervene in Darfur in a way that would avoid deepening the civilizational crisis in which we find ourselves.
If we DO intervene, Rieff is definitely NOT sanguine about the likely result.
To the contrary, such a deployment can have only one of two outcomes. The first will be the severing of Darfur from the rest of Sudan and its transformation into some kind of international protectorate, a la Kosovo. But, at least in Kosovo, the protectorate was run by Europeans — by neighbors. In Darfur, by contrast, it will be governed by Americans (who are already at war across the Islamic world) and possibly by NATO (i.e., Africa's former colonial masters). Now there's a recipe for stability.
If anything, the second possibility is even worse. Assuming the intervention encounters resistance from the Janjaweed and the government of Sudan (and perhaps al-Qaeda), the foreign intervenors will arrive at the conclusion that the only way to bring stability to Darfur is, well, regime change in Khartoum: In other words, the problems of Darfur are, in fact, the product of the al-Bashir dictatorship, and these problems can be meaningfully addressed only by substituting a more democratic government.
Such an intervention may well end up being Iraq redux, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise. But, then, it was disingenuous to pretend that the United States could democratize Iraq at the point of a gun.
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