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By tacitus Posted in Republicans — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

[W]e have concluded that genocide has taken place in Darfur. We urge the international community to work with us to prevent and suppress acts of genocide. We call on the United Nations to undertake a full investigation of the genocide and other crimes in Darfur.

The Government of Sudan has not complied with UN Security Council resolutions, and has not respected the cease-fire which it signed. The rebels are also guilty of cease-fire violations and failing to carry out past commitments. It is clear that only outside action can stop the killing. My government is seeking a new Security Council Resolution to authorize an expanded African Union security force to prevent further bloodshed. We will also seek to ban flights by Sudanese military aircraft in Darfur.

The world cannot ignore the suffering of more than one million people.

For the first time in history, a nation has invoked Article VIII of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The wheels are in motion to bring an end to the horrors of Darfur. Where the Europeans shirked the responsibilities of their humanity; where the Arabs decided that solidarity was preferable to morality; and where the United Nations functions as an impediment to justice, one nation is taking a stand.

That first nation to ever formally declare action against a genocide in progress under the Convention? The United States. And the leader who made the decision to make history on behalf of a common humanity? George W. Bush.

Read on.

It's difficult to overstate the importance of the President's decision today. Readers of Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell" know too well the appalling lack of action against genocide since the Second World War supposedly taught us the lesson of "never again." If the Holocaust did not teach us, what would? And so in years since we have seen slaughter of Cambodians, extermination of Bosniacs, and mass murder of Rwandans (of which you can read my reminiscences of its political aftermath here); all with their attendant interventions far too late -- except that of the French in Rwanda, who arrived in time to render aid and protection to their Hutu genocidaire allies -- and well after the aims of the killers had since been accomplished. The one intervention since the Holocaust to positively respond to a genocide was fraught with bitter irony: there never was a genocide of the Kosovar Albanians, even if they are now happy enough to inflict a like fate on their erstwhile Serb neighbors. What might seem the most obvious of national and international humanitarian actions -- opposition to wholesale extermination of human beings -- has proven anything but. Even the United States did not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1988 -- a full forty years after its drafting.

Today, at long last, we see George W. Bush stand up as the first post-Holocaust Western leader to call a genocide in progress by its name and seek action against it. The UN resolution that the United States is seeking is only a first step: it envisions economic sanctions, a no-fly zone over Darfur, a strengthened African Union force in place, and an international commission to assign blame where it is due. A just proposal, and also DOA -- China, with genocides of its own to its credit, will assuredly veto it. The Sudanese, who increasingly (and rightly) see the United States as an enemy, will take what succor it can from such states, either cruel themselves, or greedy for promised oil wealth to the expense of common decency.

This cannot last forever. Having thrown down the gauntlet to the Khartoum regime, the United States is by necessity, and by the terms of the Convention it now invokes, on a collision course with the forces of genocide. A nobler fight could hardly be imagined: what remains is to see how it would be waged.

On a political level, this redounds immensely to the President's benefit. It is without question the right thing to do whether you're left, right or center. It is also assuredly going to be yet another example of salutary independent action once the United Nations fails. And, as America sees President Bush standing tall for what's right -- and multilateralism be damned; see the pitiful examples above -- it will look to his opponent, whose lodestar in such situations is not to do what's right, but to run away. It will see President Bush freeing a third nation in as many years -- and it will look to his opponent, whose legacy is rather one of getting such nations enslaved.

And America, as much as the suffering masses of Darfur, will draw the appropriate conclusions from that comparison.