Apologies if this has been posted before but I didn't see it in any of today's diaries. Howard Dean has an op-ed out today in something called Sitnews (Alaska) on the
international community and Sudan.
It's a really good op-ed. I found it via
TAPPED where Sam Rosenfeld comments:
The logic here is slightly shaky -- it's not as if the United States is itching for a unilateral intervention in Sudan any time soon -- but the sentiment is right: Darfur might have been seen as an opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-lateral institutions and international engagement in halting humanitarian atrocities, but it just hasn't happened. Frustration at this state of affairs seems a more appropriate response than retrograde lefty complaints about imperialism.
I have one beef with this analysis. Certainly the US govnernment, not even most Democrats, are actively pushing for unilateral intervention in Sudan nor could we with nearly the whole military tied up in the Middle East. But that's not Dean's point. Given that the UN member countries watered down both Washington's language and proposed time limits for Sudanese government action in their last Resolution, and that the EU has refused to even characterize Sudan as the site of a genocide, Dean is absolutely right IMO to rail at this sort of milquetoast international pussyfooting without having his lack of qualifiers dismissed as "slightly shaky logic". Dean is making a great, no-holds-barred pragmatic point, both against the UN footdragging and as a bit of a rallying cry to the domestic "opposition" to Bush who ideally wouldn't stand for this sort of dithering. The international community may yearn for multilateral Kerry, but the more the UN screws around with matters of genocide, the less convincing the American centre-left's case for a more cooperative internationalist approach to all issues becomes on both ethical and pragmatic grounds, and hence the less, in the long run, that case will be made at all. Good for Howard Dean to point this out. Good for him to point it out clearly and angrily.
By the way, when checking back through old diaries to see if this had been posted before, I notice another diary on Sudan today that hasn't got a lot of traffic but is really excellent. I'm taking the liberty of linking to it.