Mike Brewer

Everyone is aware of the tragedy in Darfur. Human suffering on this kind of scale is unbelievable, and for me and many others, it is unfathomable to see such suffering and not at least attempt to get involved.

I spent an afternoon last week at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., and they have dedicated a whole wing of the museum to the genocide in Darfur. At the museum, I met a U.S. Policy analyst who was willing to talk to me about the situation and why the international community in general and the U.S. in particular has been so impotent in responding. The discussion, I'll admit, shed some light on a side of things that I had not considered.

America has been sharply criticized for taking unilateral military action against Iraq. Unilateral military action in general is seen as unacceptable, no matter what the reasons, across the whole of NATO. As I'm sure someone else can point out, the NATO charter opposes such action in clear terms. Unfortunately, a byproduct of that is that the U.S. cannot send troops into Darfur unilaterally without incurring the very same criticism we have incurred for Iraq. The same rule would be broken. Unless NATO agrees to do something, no one member can act alone. That's the statutory problem.

The political / policy problem, as my new acquaintance explained it, is that Sudan is a Muslim dominated country. Muslims are the ones committing and funding the genocide. The harsh (and morally disgusting) reality of the situation is that if the U.S. were to go to Sudan in a military capacity, it would be seen as "another" attempt by the U.S. to exploit a poor Muslim country. This is compounded incredibly by the idea that we might do it unilaterally.

What this means - especially to people like Liberty, who have judged presidential candidates on their willingness to "confront the problem" - is that the reality of the situation is more far-reaching than you might expect. There are serious factors there that cannot be ignored, nor dismissed on purely moral grounds. The reason I'm posting this here is because it's come up in several other discussions in other topics, and I'd love to get some input from those who know about the situation, and discussion-provoking questions from those who want to know more.