Bush and Darfur

I found this to be a very enlightening article about President Bush's role on Darfur. Basically, it shows a president that has been engaged on the issue, but restricted in his actions by political circumstances as well as the typical advice from foreign policy staff. To see that President Bush has been active and interested in this situation is promising. But to see that the same old things prevent action is enraging.

The main point of the article is that the White House hasn't followed through on promises to fix the situation in Dafur. The US is unwilling to commit any troops nor has it been willing to try enforcing a no-fly zone (the Sudanese military has reportedly supported Janjaweed attacks with the air force). Key aides in the Bush administration have been able to talk Bush out of these actions. In fact, we see Colin Powell advising against using military force to intervene here, just as he did during the genocides of the 1990s. The forces restraining action to stop genocide in Darfur are strikingly similar to what Samantha Power depicted in her groundbreaking work on genocide - A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide.

At the same time though, at least we had a leader that wanted to act, even if he felt constrained. It might not be popular to say this, but President Bush has done more in the face of a genocide in Sudan than Clinton did for Rwanda - and Clinton only got involved in the Balkans when his inaction was affecting his polls. Bush was willing to spend some political capital on Darfur and use the term genocide (admittedly thanks to Colin Powell, who is not afraid to talk about genocide, but never seems to want to do anything about it).

In the end though, there still has been not enough action. We need to get to a point where advisers are telling presidents how to get involved, instead of why not to. But before that happens, we need a population that is disgusted with no action in the face of these unspeakable events.