[Clive]
I’m one of those people who’s always assumed that intervention in Darfur is a moral duty. But then, a lot of us felt the same way about Iraq, so Christopher Caldwell’s warning against the military option will be pinned over my desk for the next couple of days: "Darfur is a problem the west should touch only with a very long stick." His FT column is subscriber-only, sadly, but here’s the gist:
… The pictures being evoked in western minds are oversimplifications. Darfur is not just sadists on one hand and victims on the other. It is a war. We have only the vaguest picture of what kind of war it is. Is it a race war pitting the Arabs of Khartoum against the blacks of Darfur? Is it a civil war over money and natural resources? (The rebels, too, have looted aid convoys and clashed with African Union peacekeepers.) Is Khartoum running a classic, Guatemalan-style, dry-up-the-fishpond counter-insurgency? Or is this just one front in a brewing east Africa-wide war of Islamist expansion….?
Which of these wars do we think we are joining? On whose side? The aftermath of toppling Saddam Hussein shows this question to be nearly unanswerable… The decision about which war to fight would be taken out of our hands the moment troops started landing. The number of troops necessary to pacify Darfur is often placed at 20,000 with only 5,000 elite western troops necessary to do the "heavy lifting", as the New Republic puts it.
These numbers may be wild underestimates. What if Khartoum attacked the Christian south again, confronting Nato – much as Slobodan Milosevic did when he began razing Kosovar villages after air attacks – with a choice between exposure of its hypocrisy or a massive commitment of ground troops?
The lesson of Iraq, argues Caldwell, is that "there is no such thing as a humanitarian invasion." He’s not even convinced that what’s going on in Sudan really amounts to genocide in the true sense of the word. I’m not qualified to judge, but I’m eager to see what the pro-intervention response will be.
The Dish 