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Subject: West faces its real test in Sudan
Big Bad Pariah    7/24/2004 3:56:53 AM
West faces its real test in Sudan From The Times 23jul04 THE officially sanctioned slaughter of an entire people in Sudan has elicited no more reaction from the British and US governments than a vague threat to suspend economic assistance and an offer to finance a "protection force" of 300 African soldiers to police killing fields the size of France. As a result of this official indifference to the horrors in Darfur, the one remaining moral justification for the invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a sham. It always seemed clear that the true motivation for the war on Iraq had little to do with weapons of mass destruction or United Nations resolutions. The best summary was offered by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman just before the invasion started. There were three reasons, he said. First there was the official reason: to eliminate Iraq's WMD and keep them out of the hands of terrorists. Second, there was the real reason: after September 11, the US had to prove that nobody - especially not an Arab dictator -- could defy the world's sole superpower. Finally, there was what Friedman called the "good reason": to create a prosperous, stable, pro-Western democracy in the Middle East that would act as a model for other Arab nations. That taxonomy of the war aims was an excellent beginning, but it did not go far enough. There were less honourable reasons, which were nonetheless real, including the US's generalised thirst for revenge after September 11. And there was another set of considerations that trumped the dishonourable motives, at least in the eyes of many principled supporters of the war. These were the "good" reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein. The most important was the simple moral imperative that Saddam was a monster who had terrorised his own people and committed crimes against humanity comparable with the genocides in Serbia, Kosovo and Rwanda -- and perhaps even Cambodia and Nazi Germany before that. The invasion of Iraq was not just about releasing the Iraqi people from Saddam's oppression. It was also supposed to create a precedent for a new global order, which would set a limit to the abuses that the civilised world was willing to tolerate. Of course, it would never be possible to protect all oppressed peoples from tyrannical rulers. Disproportionate military losses would always rule out humanitarian interventions in North Korea, Pakistan or China. But Saddam's overthrow was supposed to send a powerful signal to the second division of world dictators. The civilised world would not tolerate another Cambodia, Bosnia or Rwanda. According to the new doctrine, the invasion of Iraq implied that the sanctity of sovereign borders would in future be conditional on observing a minimal level of human rights. If a government defied all norms of civilised behaviour, its country could be justifiably invaded at any time. How futile such aims now appear. The genocide in Sudan is at least as monstrous as any atrocity committed by Saddam. The Sudanese Government does not use chemical weapons, but burning homes with children trapped inside, throwing families into wells to poison the water with their corpses, or raping girls as their parents are forced to watch are surely as bad. And nobody can maintain Sudan is too powerful to be threatened with punitive intervention. The Sudanese regime is a tottering wreck, which could be overthrown without excessive loss of life by international intervention. Sudan is a failed state, a breeding ground for Muslim fanatics that once harboured Osama bin Laden, and a threat to its neighbours, with its fundamentalist poison seeping into Ethiopia, Chad, Somalia and beyond. In Sudan, the US and Britain could act, but have chosen not to. Instead of acting on the new doctrine of humanitarian deterrence, they have demonstrated their pieties about human rights apply only to oil-rich states and white people. If the atrocities in Sudan are allowed to continue, there will remain no shred of justification for the invasion of Iraq. Far from deterring future bloodshed, Iraq will have sapped the will of the international community, discredited the UN and exposed the US's armed forces as a paper tiger. If the genocide in Sudan is allowed to go unpunished, the only possible conclusion will be that the world is now even safer for despotic monsters than it was before the toppling of Saddam. If so, the one remaining justification for the Iraq adventure will be exposed as just a dangerous fantasy - if not a hypocritical lie.
 
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