As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own--which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.
Kaplan isn't really speaking to me here, because I supported Iraq and support Darfur. But while I do see this dynamic somewhat, I think he overstates the case. In fact, the college students calling for Darfur intervention have varied and interesting perspectives on Iraq.
First, I'd note that the leadership for the anti-Iraq and the pro-Darfur groups aren't really the same. I know many of the top guns in our college chapter of STAND (Students Taking Action Now: Darfur), and while I suspect that most of them are not supporters of the Iraq war, they aren't and haven't been focusing their activist energies on the subject. And insofar as they are opposed to the Iraq war, it is generally a more sophisticated opposition than the shrill refrain of the partisans.
That moves me to the second point: Often times, pro-Darfurites use the genocide as a reason against the Iraq war. The case basically boils down to a zero-sum argument: if we weren't in Iraq, we could be in Darfur by now. This also cuts nicely against my argument in favor of the Iraq intervention on humanitarian grounds; if I was really serious about human rights, why didn't I dedicate my energies to a far more serious ethical catastrophe? For these people, a military solution is not just grudgingly accepted, but actively demanded. I don't really think foreign policy is zero-sum like they say, and in any event Darfur was barely on the radar in 2003. Besides, Kaplan is right that an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would yield a bloodbath that would be unacceptable from a humanitarian perspective.
I've heard complaints about tactics, and how the Bush administration mislead us in the run-up, and that it was a poor strategic move. What I'm not hearing is the reflexive aversion to US power or unilateralism that would make a Darfur intervention logically incoherent.
Although Kaplan starts his piece out talking about college students, he very rapidly moves to policy makers, pundits, and national organizations. Perhaps the argument he makes is stronger for these people. But at least here at Carleton, we take the stakes of this conflict seriously. We know that Darfur can only be saved by aggressive US action utilizing military force. In a dramatic reversal of 2003, in 2006, Iraq is the blip on the ethical radar compared to the murderous titan in Africa.
I don't think my position is really answered by the article either, because I was anti-war but am not for immediate withdrawal.I also think that Iraq in 2003 and Darfur in anytime between 2003 and now are hardly analagous.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting spin on the zero-sum argument though (which I think has some validity given finite capacity to respond) is the other factos besides military resources. For example, I read an article today about media coverage of Darfur that explained that many news peridoicals exhaust the vast amjority of their foreign reporting budget covering Iraq... leaving little to no ability to gather information about Darfur needed to make it a salient inssue in the public conciousness.