"Axis of Evil" Wanna-be
Dan Darling at Winds of Change has a post called Everything you need to know about Darfur. The title's kind of misleading, because it's actually everything you didn't know about Darfur. It's an excellent post that puts the genocide into a broader context.
The tragedy there has been filtered through the lens of the bitterness over Iraq. The anti-war crowd taunts the "get Saddam" voices because they aren't equally intent on rushing into Sudan to solve a human rights crisis. Meanwhile the go-it-alone interventionists hold up the U.N. ineptitude in Darfur as an example of why multilateralism is really just Latin for "sitting on your ass while everything goes to Hell."
Darling takes a step back. "[O]ne of the things that I think is so problematic about how Sudan is being framed to the American public is that it's being viewed almost entirely through the prism of a humanitarian crisis, a la Rwanda, and not as an issue of US national security. While the humanitarian situation in Sudan almost certainly warrants international attention and assistance, it would be a mistake not to look at the nature of the threat emanating from Khartoum towards both the US and its allies."
His post largely is based on information collected at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Sudan from Ronald Sandee, a senior counterterrorism expert at the Dutch Ministry of Defense:
The tragedy there has been filtered through the lens of the bitterness over Iraq. The anti-war crowd taunts the "get Saddam" voices because they aren't equally intent on rushing into Sudan to solve a human rights crisis. Meanwhile the go-it-alone interventionists hold up the U.N. ineptitude in Darfur as an example of why multilateralism is really just Latin for "sitting on your ass while everything goes to Hell."
Darling takes a step back. "[O]ne of the things that I think is so problematic about how Sudan is being framed to the American public is that it's being viewed almost entirely through the prism of a humanitarian crisis, a la Rwanda, and not as an issue of US national security. While the humanitarian situation in Sudan almost certainly warrants international attention and assistance, it would be a mistake not to look at the nature of the threat emanating from Khartoum towards both the US and its allies."
His post largely is based on information collected at an American Enterprise Institute conference on Sudan from Ronald Sandee, a senior counterterrorism expert at the Dutch Ministry of Defense:
"I just want to state I hope I made my point that we must see that the Sudan is not only bad inside its own country, but this government also has a lot of hard-line Islamists who are not only playing the role within their own country and not even respect their own Muslim minorities if they aren't from their own race, but that they are also--are at least entities within this government, at least people who know, are still involved in what we still call terrorism.
"There are training camps where Mujahadeen are being trained to fight the coalition in Iraq. There are training camps from where Mujahadeen go to Saudi Arabia to attack government installations. So Sudan is still paying a major role in the international terrorism."
Labels: Darfur
