Save Darfur! Don't March on Sunday

Who knew it would take OBL to make Nicholas Kristof pause in his Pulitzer-prize winning coverage of the Sudanese crisis? Kristof’s article in yesterday’s New York Times advised that he and others advocating for “a more forceful response to genocide in Darfur” should be “sobered” by the Bin-Laden tape. Apparently, Kristof has discovered, there are potential dangers to military intervention. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the OBL-induced epiphany does not lead Kristof so far as to consider not supporting the use of force, it merely requires a more clearly thought-out intervention.

So, for example, Kristof suggests the UN may avert the problem of “nationalistic sensitivities” that he fears could be stirred up by the likes of Bin-Laden by ensuring that any UN occupation will not include US ground troops. Instead, significant, well-equipped, and mobile troops should be made up primarily of Muslims, Europeans and Asians. The US and France, meanwhile, will enforce a no-fly zone from the French air base in Chad.

Even with such a plan, Kristof cautions, risks remain that the Sudanese Muslim masses may be manipulated into rioting and “lynching a few U.S. aid workers—or journalists.” But the good news for those lusting after intervention is that “the Sudanese government is hanging on by its fingernails.” In fact, Kristof reports that in an upcoming issue of Foreign Policy, Sudan is ranked “the single most unstable country in the entire world,” in their Failed States Index. This, we are to understand, is good news for the intervention, because Sudan is so weak that it will not be able to stand up to much international pressure.

Kristof is by no means the first to raise such concerns. International analysts have been advocating for non-US (or non-Western) troops in Darfur since 2004, with US/European involvement only in the funding, supply and strategic planning of operations. These strategies are an attempt to distance Darfur-type interventions from the Western nations that instigate them, an attempt to mask the power-play between the weak and strong states that is at work in these “missions.”

The need to disguise the real agents of international intervention has been particularly acute since 2004, as it became increasingly difficult to ignore the failures in Iraq. And for hawkish liberals who opposed military force in Iraq, there is an embarrassing contradiction to try to resolve. Lawrence Kaplan, of The New Republic, sees the contradiction clearly. He states that Sunday’s marchers for Darfur (organized by the Save Darfur Coalition) “will have to contend with an unwelcome guest: the specter of Iraq.” He explains that, “[e]ven the most committed progressive activists seem confused about what exactly should be done next. 'A CALL TO YOUR CONSCIENCE: SAVE DARFUR!,' 'TAKE ACTION NOW'--these are a few of the slogans that the Save Darfur Coalition suggests marchers affix to their placards at the April 30 rally. But it's purposefully unclear what the march organizers mean by 'action' and on whose 'conscience' they intend to call."

He describes progressives as being caught in a “bind of their own devising” as they criticize the US for employing military power in Iraq when it posed no imminent threat, and without support of the international community. In fact, he says, these are “precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.”

Kaplan puts his finger on the contradiction at work, and the main animating power behind the Darfur movement, a self-obsessed moralism that has much to do with personal feelings of righteousness and little to do with the Sudanese they wish to “save.” Kaplan scorns this moral grandstanding: “So, yes, march on Washington. Comfort your sensibilities. Testify to your virtue and good intentions. Offer assurance that your call to action is not a call for the unilateral or unprovoked exercise of American power.” Of course, Kaplan’s vitriol stems from his disgust that these progressives are unwilling to fully support militarism as the only thing that will get the job done (“Don’t pretend that Darfur will be saved by anything else [other than American power]” he concludes.) This, to him, points to a weakness of will, a wavering of conviction. Do we believe in saving the Sudanese or not? If so, we should certainly apply any means necessary.

In fact, Kaplan argues, that is exactly what we did in Bosnia and Kosovo, and what we need to continue to pursue whenever necessary. Kaplan draws the connection between Iraq and other interventions when many liberals are unwilling to do so. He unmasks the moral driver of international interventions, the total self-obsession of these calls to conscience. But rather than supporting his call for the full use of US force in Sudan and other similar places, Kaplan's observations actually point to exactly why such urges to humanitarian intervention must be resisted. Because humanitarian projects must prove the moral resolve of US and European leaders, they are ill suited to addressing the problems of those in whose states they intervene. Western moral resolve requires clear moral absolutes, a wronged victim on whose behalf one can slay the evil perpetrator. Humanitarianism cannot understand conflicts in the developing world for what they are, struggles between differing interests for political control. By simplifying the political situation in Iraq or Sudan or elsewhere, these movements aren’t answering to a higher law; they are attempting to fulfill the needs of the West by acting out a morality play on the stage of the Third World.