By Will Inboden
Seven months ago, when President Obama announced the appointment of
retired Maj. Gen. Scott Gration as special envoy on Sudan, I offered some
cautious words of praise and a few constructive suggestions.
As the White House prepares for Monday’s roll-out of the administration’s new Darfur strategy, it is a good time to make a
mid-course assessment. It is not positive.
According to weekend news reports prompted by administration officials previewing the strategy, in a head-snapping departure
from Obama's own campaign promises, the new approach will be a
combination of "pressure and incentives" that privileges positive
engagement. But no new measures of "pressure" are mentioned, and the administration's own descriptions
place all of the emphasis on incentives and dialogue: "to get to the
best-case scenario -- which is to change the behavior of the Khartoum
government -- we are going to have to work with a government responsible
for so many atrocities."
But what if that government doesn't
want to work with you? And what if it continues to refuse to change its
behavior? Recent events and policy trends do not lend a favorable
interpretation to the administration's line. Consider:
- Gration's first few months on the job
have included losing the confidence of important stakeholders in Sudan
such as displaced Darfurians and rebel groups, antagonizing key members of Congress and Darfur activists, and even (in a "life imitates the Onion" moment) offering "cookies" and "gold stars"
to an indicted war criminal and perpetrator of genocide (and Sudanese
president), Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The collective effect has been to
erode Gration's credibility as an honest broker, and to unilaterally
diminish the administration's leverage with the Bashir regime.
- The Obama administration self-consciously frames
its Sudan policy in the context of its overall approach of
unconditionally engaging with pariah states. "Unconditionally" is the
operative word, since while it can well be useful and effective at
times to negotiate with bad guys, in places from Burma to Iran to Sudan
the administration is on a troubling course of offering outstretched
hands full of carrots, yet no new sticks. This reflects a false
dichotomy posited between sanctions and diplomacy, when in fact the
imposition and tightening of sanctions can help strengthen the hand of
diplomacy.
- It ignores history. For a White House that prides itself
on its ostensible intellectual sophistication, the Obama administration
seems rather obtuse about the lessons of history, even the recent past.
Such as remembering that Bashir, besides presiding over the serial
murder of his own people, is also a serial violator of negotiated
agreements. Or that it was only under the pain of sanctions (and a
poignant awareness of American military might in the wake of 9/11) that
Khartoum came to the negotiating table with then-Special Envoy John
Danforth to eventually end the North-South war and forge the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement in early 2005. Or that the Bush administration's efforts in its latter years
to end the Darfur genocide included a series of positive inducements
offered to Bashir by numerous presidential envoys -- such as upgraded
diplomatic relations, removal from the terrorism sponsor list,
cessation of sanctions, etc. -- that ultimately did not avail in
changing Bashir's behavior.
- It ignores China. As Sudan's largest
investor and most consistent "heat shield" against meaningful
international pressure, any robust solution to Khartoum's depredations
runs through Beijing. Yet the Obama administration's posture toward
China appears to be a one-dimensional "China-as-our-central-banker"
strategy run out of the Treasury Department, and there are no signs of
significant efforts to enlist China in pressing Sudan.
- It ignores
international law. For an administration supposedly committed to a new
multilateral posture and cooperation with international institutions,
the Obama White House is displaying a stunning -- dare we say,
"unilateral" -- disregard for international law and the international
community. Bashir, after all, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court
for crimes against humanity. Yet the Obama administration directly
undermines the ICC through go-it-alone efforts to engage Bashir and
cooperate with him as a purportedly legitimate partner in peace efforts.
- It
could be worse. In what seems to be an emerging "Goldilocks approach"
of defaulting to the via media policy option, Obama appears to have rejected the most conciliatory posture
by continuing with some of the current sanctions and not handing Bashir
all of the inducements he would like up front (such as eschewing the
term "genocide," or allowing Khartoum to register a Washington lobbyist,
or removing it from the terrorism list, or extending full diplomatic
relations). Whether this approach represents a coherent strategy or
just a split-the-difference compromise between Gration and U.N.
Ambassador Susan Rice (said to favor a harder line) remains to be seen.
All of the above is not meant to diminish the very real
complexities in Sudan, the manifest faults on many sides, or the
failures of past efforts. But campaign rhetoric notwithstanding, the
prospects for real progress in ending the suffering and bringing
justice to Sudan are not promising under the new strategy.
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