The United States has announced that it will increase sanctions on Khartoum as part of President Bush's much ballyhooed “Plan B” to deal with the human rights catastrophe that is Darfur. Smith College's Eric Reeves, one of the most perspicacious Sudan observers, argues that sanctions will prove useless and that they represent “nothing more than a bookkeeping inconvenience” for the Sudanese government. Sudan's leadership will sputter and fulminate, of course, but it likely will not change in any meaningful way.
There is a grim reality at work. It is evident from recent history that Sudan won't change unless forced to do so, and that force may have to come in the form of, well, force. We live in a world in which America's misadventures in Iraq have given military intervention a bad name and have made placing boots on the ground anathema as a first or second resort. But mismanaging Iraq should not make the United States squeamish about intervention elsewhere if there is a moral and strategic imperative and if there is the will, not only at home, but also globally.
A long-term plan will require more than troops, and will involve international cooperation, a willingness to desanctify the idea of “international sovereignty,” and something beyond an ad hoc approach to address the crisis of the day. Lee Feinstein, a Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and International Law at the Council on Foreign Relations has addressed some of these ideas in a CFR special report, “Darfur and Beyond: What is Needed to Prevent Mass Atrocities.”
Things have gone so far without a response from the global community that there are no easy answers and there certainly will be no clean resolutions. But the lack of a clean and easy solution does not mean that there are no solutions. This distinction makes an enormous difference.
