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Skeptic Ian Williams questions an earlier president.

Sudan, To Intervene – or not to Intervene?

by Ian Williams 

Ian Williams is a journalist and U.N. Correspondent for The Nation and a weekly columnist for www.MaximsNews.com   Order his new book, Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past. See Below to order Online from Amazon.com.  See his Bio.  See his columns listed below.   IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com 

          UNITED NATIONS -- 27 July 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com /   There are times, as now with Sudan, that we are in the agonized position of Tom Lehrer’s Christian Scientist, who was opposed to all surgery – but could consider a pragmatic exception as acute appendicitis gnawed at his bowels.

Being “for” or “against” intervention in the abstract is, frankly, silly. It is like being for or against surgery.

You can oppose punitive amputation of limbs, be dubious about procedures that do more for profits than patients, but still be all in favor of operations that have clearly beneficial results, while still invoking the Hippocratic principle, “Above all do no harm.”

However, we can be sure that, faced with the question of genocide in Sudan, far too many pundits and polemicists on both left and right try to polarize such serious and complicated questions into binary, for or against positions and derive false syllogisms. “You approved intervention in Kosovo, so you must have supported the War in Vietnam, and so how can you oppose intervention in Iraq?”

George W. Bush told his speechwriters he didn’t want no nuance in his speeches. They have clearly done as they were told, but that’s is no reason for those of not lexically challenged to descend to such binary thinking.

Those women being raped, the men and women being killed in Sudan may understandably wonder what all that has to do with their agonies.

The effect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the whole drift of international humanitarian law since then has been to establish that individuals have sovereignty, as well as states.

However, the concepts can be contradictory – can Fidel Castro invade the U.S. because 40 million Americans have no health insurance.

Can the U.S. invade Cuba because it arrests dissidents? Botched or bogus interventions can do immense harm to the whole humanitarian idea.

There have always been such problems with humanitarian intervention as a concept. Nazi Germany invoked it to cover their invasion of Czechoslovakia.

To prevent such partisan invocation of humanitarianism to justify military aggression, the Canadian-convened international commission on the “Responsibility to Protect” three years ago suggested a set of precautionary principles, which they summarized, self-explanatorily as:

·          Right intention, that there should not be any hidden agenda,

• Last resort, that all other means have been tried,

• Proportional means,  that you do destroy the village to save it,

• Reasonable prospects, that you have a clear plan and are not just pottering around to show you are doing something,

• Right Authority – by which last they meant U.N. authorization.

You will note that the Iraq intervention failed on all counts.

The sad truth is that thousands of people in Darfur have died, and many more probably will and it is, at least in part because of George W. Bush and Tony Blair’s failed adventure in Iraq.

It is easy to understand the fears of those who worry where “humanitarian” interventions end and crusades start since the Bush/Blair excuse machine has tried to blur just such distinctions.

Their desperate retrospective humanitarian excuses for that invasion were a inverted diplomatic version of “crying wolf.” They shouted “lambs” and behaved like wolves.

Who will now believe them if they shout the same slogans for Sudan?

It is clear that the Sudanese government controls the murderous militia around Darfur and is every bit as culpable as Milosevic was for the paramilitary murder gangs in the Balkans.

But the Sudanese regime learned its lesson from Milosevic. Express concern. Offer to let in aid workers, and then impose conditions. If you are in doubt, agree to talk but give the U.N. the runabout.

On the positive side, the world has also learned from Milosevic and from Rwanda. Kofi Annan and others at the U.N. are pushing hard and testing Khartoum’s word, progressively stripping away the excuses.

However, even if you accept the need for intervention of some kind in Sudan, who would you trust to do it?

To continue the medical metaphor, would you call on Jack the Ripper to carry out the operation?

He was by all accounts an expert anatomist, and had an impressive set of instruments: but both his motivation and his post-operative care left something to be desired.

For most of the world, George W. Bush has about the same credibility in the healing arts as the old London fog night prowler.

Not only has the invasion of Iraq raised the barrier against any serious international consensus for action in Sudan, too vigorous a push by the U.S. for it would probably stiffen resistance.

One can indeed despair of the Arab world’s tolerance for barbarity by their own rulers. But we have to admit that following the war on Iraq,  the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the U.S.’s total protection for Ariel Sharon’s pogroms in Gaza, and the xenophobic anti-Muslim and anti-Arab outbursts in the United States, it is hardly surprising that many governments and their people across the world will cut some slack for any Arab regime in the face of American “concern.”

In the case of Sudan, in particular, there is also Clinton’s botched destruction of the pharmaceuticals factory that demonstrated, long before 9-11 and Iraqi WMD that military intelligence is often an oxymoron.

We often, quite rightly, call the U.S. to account for its expedient abuse of principles, and there are indeed very solid reasons, from Central America to East Timor and Iraq, why we should examine very critically any intervention that the U.S. even hints at.

It is indeed a good rule of thumb to doubt Washington’s intentions, but, sometimes, finer measurements, and indeed nuances, are called for.

In this case, Colin Powell does indeed have a point, even if one could suspect that some of the U.S. lobby groups pushing for action are more zealous in the case of Sudan than they would be if they could not characterize the perpetrators as “Arabs.”

On the other hand, sadly, there is no shortage of countries that will support a rogue state for reasons of shortsighted or expedient “national interest.”

Security Council members Algeria and Pakistan as representatives of Arab and Muslim States, not to mention their own state interests and domestic politics, would find it almost impossible to agree to U.S. led action against an Arab League member like Sudan.

We should not be reassured just because some of the members opposing action against Sudan also opposed the war in Iraq.

France springs to mind, as the patron of the former Rwandan regime, protector almost up to last moment of the Serbian ethnic cleansers in Bosnia, the defender of Morocco’s occupation and repression in Western Sahara – and even if French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin did make an excellent case against attacking Iraq – previously a thoroughly expedient defender of French oil interests in Iraq.

As a result of this objective alliance of the expediently supportive and the expediently opposed, it is sadly almost inconceivable that the Security Council or the General Assembly would authorize the robust military operation that would be necessary – or perhaps more usefully, the credible threat of a military operations, which in many such cases, from the Balkans to Rwanda is all that it would have taken to preempt genocide.

Instead, the U.S.’s draft resolution is a tokenistic one reminiscent of the worst days of the Bosnian tragedy in that it pretends to be doing something, but in reality does nothing.

It would mandate sanctions and travel restrictions against a motley paramilitary band of Sudanese brigands and militia who are unlikely to have many cosmopolitan world travelers in their ranks.

One cannot help suspecting a gesture designed to cover the administration’s backside against the “If Iraq, why not Sudan” argument that is denting its already shredded ethical credibility.

So the question of support or opposition for intervention is a genuine quandary, but it is surely important that we do not let people die in Sudan just so we can feel vindicated in our stand against interventions.

A credible threat of intervention has to be made soon – but kept within those “precautionary principles.” The United Nations itself is not designed to conduct robust operations which could involve serious fighting, which is why it often “franchises” them.

Ideally, the Arab League should act, but they will not. The African Union has made a start, but it is hopelessly under-resourced, and similar regional operations in Sierra Leone and Liberia were much mitigated successes.

In this case, even with the worries about neo-colonization, this is a matter on which the EU should be given the blue-flag franchise, and especially Germany, whose clean credentials on the Iraq War clears it of the Crusader connotations.

Britain and the U.S. should stay in the background, at best offering logistics and funding and the most discreet diplomatic support.

And if France persists in blocking, maybe it’s time for the half of us who bought their vin rouge in solidarity, last year, to restart the boycott this year from another, more principled angle!

     Email Ian Williams:  IanWilliams@MaximsNews.com

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Deserter: George Bush's War on Military Families, Veterans, and His Past  

by Ian Williams

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Ian Williams' Weekly Columns in MaximsNews.com

Sudan, To Intervene – or not to Intervene?  27 July 2004

Mr. Sharon, Tear Down This Wall!  16 July 2004

William Safire – Warped, on Speed, or Just Running Mad Again?  13 July 2004

Bosnian U.N. Defender Locked Up  7 July 2004

The U.N., the U.S. & the I.C.C.  30 June 2004

The New York Times, William Safire and the United Nations  23 June 2004

Hastily Contrived, Verbose, and Fudged: Security Council Resolution 1546  16 June 2004

Is the U.S. Clever Enough to Rule the World?  9 June 2004

Humor the Beast: the U.S. and the ICC  2 June 2004

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  20 May 2004

The Solution to the Iraqi Knot  12 May 2004     

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