>Sudan isn't just a great candidate for jihad--the jihadis are already in
>power. As I recall, Osama has made several visits there in the past--very
>comfortable in Sudan.
Indeed, but 'jihad' in the sense that you mean it is one thing that has not emerged from Sudan. Noticeably, however ideologically convivial the Khartoum regime and the political culture may be for bin Laden, the country has yet to produce a single suicide attacker. If the Pape thesis is correct, then you can expect that to change if the US intervenes.
>If you really want the back story, what I've heard is
>that the US isn't intervening because the islamic gov is feeding the Bush
>admin just enough info on al-queda to keep us out of the country.
The head of Sudan's secret police has been assisting in the rendition programme, but the bigger scoop is that the US government is not remotely interested in stopping 'genocide', having perpetrated genocide itself on one or two occasions. The oil infrastructure is of some interest and the British government has some interest in this via BP's involvement, but the major concern for the US government, one imagines, is the access that China will have.
>The situation in Sudan is actually quite complex. The current genocide, as
>well as I understand it, pits muslim against muslim in the north; a civil
>war with Christians and animists has only recently been concluded (but
>could
>flare up again) in the south.
The SPLA/M was fighting a just war against the Khartoum government if you ask me, but it is incorrect to describe that war as one of the government against Christians and animists. First of all, the war was not *defined* by the ethno-religious axis, and secondly, the SPLA/M were fighting alongside the JEM, an Islamist outfit associated with al-Turabi. However, whence this talk of genocide? Khartoum's behaviour is certainly brutal and despicable, but it seems curious that when the scale of killing is actually lower than it was, say, in 2004, that this issue should suddenly pop to the fore. Perhaps it is in part because of the US-commissioned survey last year which said that thousands of Darfurians had been killed by the militias. Perhaps it is because Colin Powell says so. Perhaps it is because of repeated claims that 200,000 have been killed over the last three years.
The 200,000 figure derives from a UN report last year which said that 180,000 people had died since the beginning of the conflict in Darfur: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4349063.stm
That figure refers to deaths from illness and malnutrition.
Further, as Mercedes Taty of MSF has pointed out, this harsh repression is not being conducted prescisely on ethnic lines (Arab vs non-Arabs is the usual paradigm). It is a brutal war by a repressive government against a just insurgency and has to be understood as such. Reducing it to a simple humanitarian calamity in which a great white American superman can save the day, in which the suffering people themselves have no agency, is to repeat the same Orientalist discourse that facilitated the invasion of Iraq - or indeed, Somalia. Once the occupied people realised that the US did not have their interests at heart, they put that agency to work.
>It would be simply about preventing the mass rapes and ethnic
>cleansing now happening from recurring. Oh, and if they stopped the slave
>trade that is still happening in Sudan, that would be nice too.
It would be nice if the US could first stop the massive suffering it is responsible for, and yet I can't see how repeating previous disastrous military interventions is likely to help here. Surely if the US had the interests of Sudanese people at heart, it would a) break off relations with the Sudanese government, b) stop blocking attempts to try war criminals in the ICC, c) dispatch large amounts of humanitarian aid, d) open its borders to refugees and encourage the EU to do the same.
>The exit strategy would be straightforward: pull out all troops out the
>minute the parties were separated and import peacekeepers--preferably from
>Africa or from muslim countries. The Sudanese people will have to sort out
>the politics themselves.
The exit would be to the sound of rat-a-tat-tat. You're not talking about breaking up a fight in a school (separating the parties). You're talking about the US militarily intervening either with an air war or a ground invasion in a country far larger than Iraq, with a considerably reduced infrastructure. In that state of war, and war it would be, you're talking about an even bigger humanitarian catastrophe, more refugees, more starvation, more disease, more innocent victims, and a fantastic new frontline in the 'war on terror'. As for the Sudanese people sorting out the politics themselves - you're talking about intervening in an intensely political situation, and that means the US in asserting control of the country would have to solicit the complicity of some social and political strata, which means privileging the politics of one group over another.
This myth of 'humanitarian intervention' needs to be dropped, urgently. If it refers to actions by imperialist powers, then there is no such thing.
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