A Real Test on Darfur
When I did my post yesterday welcoming the Bush administration's apparent decision to push for a greater international peacekeeping presence in Darfur, I had not, unfortunately, read Mark Goldberg's new article up at The American Prospect site. As Mark explains, there are all sort of signals that the U.S. is finally getting serious about Darfur, but the rest test of U.S. policy is whether the CIA goes along with efforts to bring to justice some of the worst perpetrators of the Darfur outrage, including at least one important "intelligence asset" in the Khartoum government.
It's reasonably clear by now that the threshold you have to cross to understand the Darfur disaster is to recognize that all the talk about racial or tribal conflict in the region is a smokescreen for a deliberate effort by the government of Sudan to neutralize Darfur once and for all as a "problem" for Khartoum, by the worst means possible. And as long as the U.S. fails to cross that threshold and keeps acting as though Khartoum is a part of the solution, and not the main problem, a small bump in peacekeeping forces won't ultimately do much good.
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