Mick Hartley

There's a long piece in the latest New Republic by Richard Just, reviewing all the recent literature on Darfur:

After a while, reading all these books together, the tales become strikingly repetitive. Over and over, villages are bombed by government planes and swarmed by Janjaweed fighters; women are raped; survivors flee toward camps, with many dying along the way. These similarities point to something significant: they suggest the systematic nature of what has occurred in Darfur over the past several years. Taken together, the books show why the Darfur tragedy cannot be dismissed as just a series of bad things. At a certain point, the mountain of nearly identical anecdotes contained in the Darfur literature (not to mention the reports of human rights organizations and the dispatches of wire services) pile so high that they leave the realm of the anecdotal and become something more–a record of murderous collective malice that has to be regarded as greater, and more pre-meditated, than the sum of its individual parts.

Radical evil has become commonplace in Darfur. It is impossible to reach any other conclusion. There are simply too many government-sponsored men who show up in these narratives solely for the purpose of committing almost incomprehensible acts of cruelty. The sadism knows no bounds.

But isn't it really, as so many commentators like to tell us, a lot more complicated than that? Well…..no:

If there is anything the Darfur literature makes clear, it is that the prime cause of the genocide is the national government. Not ancient and immovable tribal hatreds among Darfuris, but a particular regime in Khartoum.

So, to put it simply, the only way to stop the killing is to get rid of the government. Diplomatic efforts are useless if one side is uninterested in diplomacy except as a way of postponing any chance of a settlement, and the will just hasn't been there either from the UN – where China amongst others will veto any serious use of force – or from within Africa, with the African Union forces proving woefully inadequate to the task of protecting Darfuri civilians, or from the Arab/Muslim world, which essentially is always going to support Bashir's regime.

It's down to the US and/or NATO, then. But…

The Bush administration's hesitation to assemble a NATO coalition and enter Darfur without permission from Khartoum was somewhat understandable, given what was taking place in Iraq. When the final history of Darfur is written, Iraq will surely be judged to have been a central factor mitigating against action in Sudan.

Well yes; Iraq. That was the big mistake, apparently. Darfur, on the other hand… 

A brief comparison. then. Both Saddam's Iraq and Bashir's Sudan launched genocidal campaigns against minority groups within their respective countries; the Kurds, and the various tribes in Darfur. You might add the Marsh Arabs to the Saddam charge sheet, after the first Gulf War. And….well, that's about it. Bashir and his National Islamic Front fade away at this point. They really can't compete. They're milksops by comparison. Saddam invaded two of his neighbours, Iran and Kuwait, setting off wars that killed millions. He defied international demands for a decade and ignored 18 UN Security Council resolutions to come clean about his weapons programmes, a situation which led everyone – not just George Bush and Tony Blair – to believe that, if not in actual possession of WMDs, he was at least determined to get them as soon as the opportunity arose. In addition, along with his psychopathic sons, he ran a regime of such vicious mindless brutality towards even the merest hint of opposition that it could easily stand comparison with the very worst of the 20th Century – a time not without its share of brutality.

And now the Save Darfur crowd – the overwhelming majority of whom, I'd bet, viewed the Iraq invasion as a major disaster if not a war crime – come to the inevitable conclusion that invasion is the only way:

Many were uncomfortable with the use of force. Cheadle and Prendergast [authors of one of the books under review] are candid about this: "Many of us peace and human rights advocates are rightly reluctant about the use of force. We need to get over it. There is such a thing as evil in this world, and sometimes the only way to confront evil is through the judicious use of military force." Amen, as long as "judicious" also means effective.

So….invading Iraq was a colossal blunder but invading Sudan is going to be just fine – providing it's judicious and effective. Which looks remarkably like a get-out clause if – or rather when – things don't go exactly according to plan. They'll support an invasion up to the point where Bashir comes out of his palace with his hands up, muttering about it being a fair cop, and gets led away in chains to the cheers of the surrounding crowds. But when the jihadists start streaming in from across the Libyan and Egyptian borders and the bombs start exploding in the market-places; when the world-wide demonstrations start up, with the cries of neo-colonialism and "it's all about the oil"; when award-winning films appear to rapturous receptions across Europe showing the peace-loving Sudanese happily flying their kites until the murderous US troops arrive; when the Lancet publishes figures claiming that casualty rates have been vastly underestimated and deaths are in fact far higher than they ever were under Bashir; when far left groups claim that there was in fact no Darfur genocide, that it was all a fabrication of the CIA and the Zionists in cahoots with a compliant Western media; then, well, then they'll very likely be joining in the cries for Bush – or whoever – to be tried as a war criminal.

It's a win-win situation for the campaigners. Bush is criticised for not doing anything in Sudan. If he (or his successor) ever did decide to do something – well, as soon as blood started flowing, you just know who would get the blame.

That the situation in Darfur has been allowed to carry on for so long is an indictment of the United Nations, of China, of the African Union, of Arab and Muslim leaders. George Bush and the United States come way down the list.