Redstate

another day another truly bad idea

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (23) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Part of the Clinton administration foreign policy brain trust, Susan Rice and Anthony Lake, along with New Jersey congressman Donald Payne fronted an op-ed entitled We Saved Europeans. Why Not Africans?

Once we get past the ugly race-baiting in the title (and the irony of Susan Rice being an author given her involvement in forcing the elected government of Sierra Leone to share power with the brutal RUF guerrilla organization) we have another great reason to never trust the Democrats with national security again. Unsurprisingly, they claim that Kosovo was a great success and it was achieved by the relatively bloodless means of selectively bombing targets in what was then Yugoslavia, such as the ChiCom embassy.

Read on.

I don’t want to refight the entire Balkans campaign but I think any fair reading of the events there clearly indicates that by the time NATO intervened in 1999 that the rump Yugoslavian state was a spent force and that within Kosovo ethnic cleansing, by all parties, did more to establish equilibrium than the malfeasance and misfeasance of Wesley Clark.

The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.

If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it. Impossible? No, the United States acted without U.N. blessing in 1999 in Kosovo to confront a lesser humanitarian crisis (perhaps 10,000 killed) and a more formidable adversary. Under NATO auspices, it bombed Serbian targets until Slobodan Milosevic acquiesced. Not a single American died in combat. Many nations protested that the United States violated international law, but the United Nations subsequently deployed a mission to administer Kosovo and effectively blessed NATO military action retroactively.

Unthinkable in the current context? True, the international climate is less forgiving than in 1999. Iraq and torture scandals have left many abroad doubting our motives and legitimacy. Some will reject any future U.S. military action, especially against an Islamic regime, even if it is purely to halt genocide against Muslim civilians. Sudan has also threatened that al-Qaeda will attack non-African forces in Darfur -- a real possibility since Sudan long hosted Osama bin Laden and his businesses. Yet, to allow another nation to deter the United States by threatening terrorism would set a terrible precedent. It would also be cowardly and, in the face of genocide, immoral.

But even if one were to stipulate simply for the purposes of argument that Kosovo worked as advertised I would still hope that reasonable people could agree that there really are no similarities between Kosovo and Somalia.

At least Milosevic’s Serbia had things they wished to protect. Bridges, auto factories, trains, etc. Serbia is small, it was surrounded by neighbors who didn’t like it very much, it was easily accessible to any military force that wanted to take a whack at it.

The issue here is the implication that dropping bombs is going to change anything in Darfur. They really have no infrastructure to speak of. The Sudan military isn’t the primary instrument of genocide, rather government induced famine and the janjaweed militia. How blockading Sudan helps the condition of the Africans now being slaughtered and starved when any relief supplies they receive come through those ports is beyond my comprehension.

Is the basic Peace of Westphalia principle of sovereignty applicable to failed states or does the UN, or in the Rice-Lake op-ed a vague international coalition, have the right to act as sort of a conservator or guardian for failed states? At what point would we draw the line? North Korea? Burma? What do we do with and for these nominal states once we stop the slaughter? Do we put them into receivership? Taken to its logical conclusion Rice and Lake are really calling for a return to some form of imperialism else our periodic forays to stop the killing in some Third World dung heap doesn’t seem to make much sense.

There is no doubt that a tragedy is taking place in Darfur. The answer to that tragedy is a bit more, to quote John F. Kerry, nuanced than military intervention, especially US military intervention. The Darfur tragedy is a paradigm for what the West will face for the next few decades as globalization swiftly divides the world into complacent haves and raging have-nots and we should take some time to get this right.