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Julie
Flint & Alex deWaal,
Darfur: a short history of a long war. Zed
Books, in association with International African
Institute, 2005. 151 pages.
Gérard Prunier.
Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide. Cornell
University Press, 2005. 212 pages.
David Morse.
The Iron Bridge (1998)
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Clinton or Obama: Who’s Best on Darfur?
By David Morse
Readers doubtless
have their own opinions about the relative merits of
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as potential future
presidents. Though I don’t believe in single-issue
politics, I feel strongly enough about Darfur, in
western Sudan, to want to know how the two candidates
stack up.
I’m focusing here
on the two Democrats, because—although Darfur is an
issue that cuts across traditional divisions between
progressives and conservatives—John McCain’s fixation on
Iraq would effectively doom any progress on Darfur.
To be fair, both
Obama and Clinton have indicated concern for Darfur. Neither candidate is
offering anything new. Neither seems to appreciate fully
the precariousness of the situation in South Sudan,
where the failure of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement
there could re-ignite the same genocidal pattern that
has racked Darfur.
Characteristically,
Obama’s position on Darfur is long on generalizations
and short on particulars. He voices sympathy for Darfur,
favors a UN peacekeeping force that would include attack
helicopters, and urges strengthening of the African
Union force; he provides links on his web-site to such
organizations as the Genocide Intervention Network, the
Save Darfur Coalition, and the International Rescue
Committee.
Hillary Clinton,
true to form, is more specific and more aggressive. She
wants to appoint a Presidential envoy to Sudan, a step
President Bush has already taken. She wants to involve
NATO more heavily, and to enforce the UN-declared “no
fly” zone to prevent aerial assaults against Darfuri
villages. She seems quick to embrace a military
solution.
I want to see more
specifics from Obama, and am wary that the more
militaristic Clinton approach would end up costing more
civilian lives. I would rather see both candidates show
more resourcefulness in pursuing diplomatic solutions
toward untying a knot that cannot be loosened
militarily—one that must be teased apart with strong and
steady diplomacy. To my knowledge, neither candidate
talks about multifaceted economic pressures we might put
on Khartoum directly and indirectly through China, and
neither mentions our own CIA’s links to Khartoum—two key
failings in the Bush administration’s posture toward
Sudan.
Neither candidate
emphasizes the regional approach that is needed in
dealing with a huge and strategically located country
(very nearly a failed state) bordered by ten countries—a
nation whose chief export has been human misery.
Why do I lean
toward Obama?
First, and
generally, I think that of the two candidates he’s more
serious about getting out of Iraq.
But in particular I
would like to explore a point that’s been lost—like so
many—in one of the recent dust-ups that have made this
such a sour primary—a primary that threatens to sour
whatever coherence the Democrats have managed to
achieve.
I’m referring to
the forced resignation of Samantha Power from the Obama
campaign. It was Obama’s appointment of Power in the
first place that leads me to think he could conceivably
become the first American president to respond
meaningfully to a genocide.
Power’s book,
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,
examines both the causes of genocide and our collective
failure as a nation to respond. When I
http://talknationradio.com/?p=59 interviewed
her in November 2006, in her Harvard office, Power
impressed me as particularly savvy in her understanding
of the ways that Iraq and Darfur are inextricably
linked. As senior foreign policy advisor to the Obama
campaign, she was uniquely positioned to apprise him of
the challenges he will face if elected.
George W. Bush has
remained paralyzed, like the proverbial deer in the
headlights, before the present genocide in Darfur and
the looming potential for genocide in South Sudan. His
administration brokered the Comprehensive Peace
Agreement in the South, and made political hay of it.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hailed the CPA as
the single most positive foreign policy achievement of
his administration. But instead of supporting that
hard-won agreement, the Bush administration has turned
its back on the CPA—and worse, undermined it in various
ways.
Samantha Power’s
fall from grace is lamentable. An outspoken but
respected scholar, she’s unfortunately a rookie at
hardball politics. She lost her cool. What happened was
this:
Obama had
acknowledged in a speech that the speed with which he
could withdraw troops from Iraq would depend on
circumstances at the time. Power, in a subsequent BBC
interview let herself get mousetrapped into calling her
boss’s 16-month timetable for withdrawal of troops a
“best case” scenario.
Hillary Clinton
pounced on the BBC remark as though she’d caught Obama’s
senior foreign policy advisor undercutting his message
on troop withdrawal. Power, rising to Clinton’s bait,
responded in anger during an interview with The
Scotsman. She tried to go off the record, but the
words were already out of her mouth. She’d called
Clinton a “monster” who would stoop to anything. The
Clinton camp landed on her with both hobnailed boots.
Power issued an
abject apology and resigned. Obama distanced himself
from her comment. The bruising tit-for-tat campaign
slogs on. Power’s dismissal was matched by Geraldine
Ferraro’s dismissal from the Clinton team days later for
an even more stupid (because arguably racist) blunder.
What got lost, as
usual, was the larger picture. Clinton’s attack served
to muddy perceptions of Obama’s position on Iraq.
Power’s fatal “Monster” outburst became the story and
distracted attention from Sudan and Iraq.
If my hunch is on
target—that Barack Obama is preparing himself to deal
with genocide—seems underwhelming or obvious, consider
our history of failures. Bush is hardly alone in his
paralysis. Consider Bill Clinton’s performance on
Rwanda, which Samantha Power critiqued in her book.
Again, Iraq enters
the picture:
By continuing the
first Bush administration’s policy of enforcing
draconian sanctions in Iraq, President Clinton caused
more civilian deaths than all the bombs dropped during
the first Gulf War. The sanctions—technically UN, but
enforced by the U.S. and U.K. “no fly” zones— were
designed to heap such misery on civilians that they
would rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
It was a cruelly
cynical policy. Saddam Hussein and the Baathist elite
were scarcely affected. The sanctions came down hardest
on the Iraqi poor—especially children and the very old.
By 1996 a UN report showed more than a million Iraqis
had died, more than half of them children.
In effect, Bill
Clinton paved the way for the second Bush’s invasion of
Iraq. Little wonder the Iraqis did not welcome American
troops as liberators, and why the poorest neighborhoods
such as Sadr City are most adamantly anti-American!
While this was
going on, Bill Clinton turned his back on Rwanda, where
an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in the span
of three months. Years afterwards, he apologized to
Rwandans, claiming he “didn’t know.” But Bill did know.
The record shows he was given plenty of facts. He was
simply paralyzed.
Looking at Hillary
Clinton, we see can’t help noticing that her claim on
experience and readiness to handle crises “from day one”
are based largely on her experience in her husband’s
administration. So it’s only fair to ask: When is
Hillary going to distance herself from Bill’s inertia in
Iraq and Rwanda, and prove that she is her own woman?
The answer, I
conclude, for now, is never. She is too invested in
Iraq, too little invested in Sudan. Hillary Clinton
would do business as usual. That, for my money, is the
real monster: inertia in precisely those regions of
conflict where Americans with any sense of decency
expect serious change.
I’m casting my ballot for Obama.
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© David Morse. 2008.
David Morse is a journalist whose articles and
commentary have appeared in newspapers and on-line in
Alternet, Salon, TomDispatch, and
elsewhere. He recently traveled to South Sudan with
support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and
is now writing a book about Sudan.
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posted 17 March 2008 |
