Good Intentions

I have to say I'm with IOZ on this one. One assumes as a given that most people, regardless of ideology, are touched by the ongoing genocide in Darfur. It's a rational response to insist that Something Be Done. But what? How? Most importantly, by whom? UN peacekeeping forces have been remarkably ineffective in a wide variety of areas, standing idly by while butchers did their thing in Srebrenica and Rwanda. So you can propose a UN force in southern Sudan, sure, but don't be surprised if they fail to stanch the flow of blood. And that's if the Chinese and Russians don't overrule such a move, which is highly unlikely.

Because Americans like simple solutions to problems, and simple explanations for them as well, it is easier to look at Darfur as a simple dichotomous conflict between Arab Muslims and black animist Christians. But this is like calling the Grand Canyon a big hole; it explains nothing of the specifics. It makes more sense to look at this as a violent expropriation of restive lands from a minority ethnic group. Perhaps if the janjaweed gave their victims smallpox-laden blankets the historical parallel would become more evident.

So. There are issues of land use, water, oil and economics underlying the more obvious faultlines of ethnic strife. Global warming is probably directly contributing to the increasing Saharification in the region. You have an international organization that is far more adept at accentuating the petty grievances of its members than in pooling their resources for meaningful police action. And you have a cohort of people who, because of media coverage and frequently in religious kinship, have taken this issue under their collective wing and heightened their insistence for its necessary resolution.

But nobody seems to be proposing exactly how this is to be done. The U.S. could not intervene unilaterally, even if it had a compelling rational self-interest there, even if its military wasn't overstretched elsewhere, even if the Chinese wouldn't mind greatly our interference. The logistics alone of putting and keeping a force of any meaningful size in the region would be prohibitive. And that's just to stop the carnage. Who repatriates the refugees, in a country we know absolutely nothing about, and whose own government is actively oppressing and murdering these people? You can't just go down to the county clerk's office and look up everyone's property deed and give it all back to the rightful owners.

Humanitarian interventions, for all their stated good intentions, rarely work as advertised. Unnoticed in its recent self-declaration of independence is that Kosovo is little more than a way-station for organized crime, with a giant U.S. base (Camp, uh, Bondsteel) in the center. No water, no electricity, a seething young unemployed population, and lots of heroin and girls moving through. And the usual "rebuilding" contracts are handed out with the usual institutional opacity to the usual profiteers.

And that's a small, easily accessible, more ethnically similar region. Imagine trying to deal with all those problems and more in a much more inhospitable, inaccessible, culturally hostile, and geographically large region. I'm not exactly a Kaplan devotee, and his name seems to be mud in most bien pensant librul circles, but the guy knows the places and the people firsthand, and predicted many aspects of the current dynamic over a decade ago.

We have our hands full as it is, and Africa is an intractable problem, much of it post-colonial but much of it self-perpetuating too; when multitudes of individuals all over the continent take several wives and have dozens of uneducated, unemployed children in disease-ridden shitholes, demographic disaster is to be expected at some point. And China's massive ratcheting up of its own oil demand, and the attendant geopolitical contingencies, is an entirely predictable consequence of globalizing labor and finance to the degree we have with them. Hell, some circles of U.S. policymaking are still haggling over whether or not to hand out condoms in Africa. Talk about not being on the same page; some of these fools aren't even in the same library as cold, hard reality.

Certainly that doesn't mean Darfur should be ignored, nor should Congo's horrific ongoing slaughter (which is currently double Darfur's and has involved most of its bordering neighbors). But well-intentioned people can and should realize that the direct approach, while more fulfilling, is practically unworkable for a variety of reasons.

Yet there are clear economic interests which can be addressed through diplomatic back channels; a partnering arrangement with the Chinese could be proposed and undertaken, giving them the prestige they seek and allowing us to have a righteous hand in all this. Still, only the Chinese are going to be able to effectively lean on the Sudanese government. We can work with them, but not without them.

The other tack may be to address the acquisition of arms by the Sudanese government and the militias. Are these official government procurements, or are they clandestine large-scale arms dealers, such as Viktor Bout, animals for whom killing is a business, and business is always good?

There should be a way to proceed with the lessons of Kosovo (anticipating localized consequences of humanitarian intervention) and Iraq (knowing something about the place and people you plan on occupying; preparing for fourth- and fifth-generation tactics) intact, but blundering in on another misguided mission of self-righteousness is fortunately not even on the table.