Regarding hoisting and petards and Sudan

This analysis is fair but incomplete. The Bush admininstration, or at least its State Department, did not deserve much of the criticism it got over Sudan, particularly during the period when Robert Zoellick held the portfolio for this problem as Deputy Secretary of State. It approached the issue seriously and made the most out of the very limited tools it had -- or chose to have -- at its disposal.

The fact remains that its policy didn't accomplish very much, and the qualifer above is important. Sudan began its war against civilians in early 2003 with the full support of other Arab governments, the necessary condition for avoiding international isolation over a policy that benefited no other country and caused hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. At no time did the Bush administration make a public issue of this with any Arab government. It never challenged united Arab opposition to an effective international peacekeeping force in Darfur, nor was it vocal about Arab niggardliness in the provision of humanitarian aid. Even the propaganda value of an Arab government long sympathetic to international terrorism slaughtering ethnic African Muslim civilians by the tens of thousands was neglected by the last administration, an odd thing considering the level of concern the Bush administration accorded the threat of Islamist terrorism in Africa.

The reasons the Bush administration chose a diplomacy of weakness on the Darfur problem obviously had much to do with its struggle to maintain some level of official Arab support for the foolish adventure in Iraq that in so many ways was the cornerstone of Bush's entire Presidency. It may well have been related as well to the woolly romanticism with which Bush himself approached Arabs; while he left genocide sponsored by an Arab government in Khartoum to subordinates, he himself was giving fatuous speeches about freedom being "on the march" in Arab countries and implying that the lack of democracy in the Arab world was the fault of the United States.

It would be fair enough to respond to this that Bush's critics on the Darfur issue were no more eager than he was to address the foundation of Sudan's ability to avoid the international isolation that might have moderated its behavior. Indeed, by 2008 many of the Americans most concerned about the Darfur crisis that had begun five years earlier were convinced that the root of the problem was Chinese government policy -- as if an American quarrel with China over events already well underway in Africa was something any administration would involve itself in, even an administration as feckless about American national interests as Bush's. It wasn't only George Bush who was convinced that good intentions were good enough where Darfur was concerned.

The fact remains that Sudan, an unsteady regime vulnerable to international pressure if left to stand on its own, was never forced to stand on its own. More precisely, no attack on the foundation of the support it did have was ever made. The blame for this deserves to be draped over the top of the Bush administration.

To say that is not to denigrate the substantial, and substantially thankless, efforts of Zoellick and other American diplomats who strove for years to put out the fire in Darfur with the brooms and squirt-guns they had to work with. They deserve better than to be treated, as so many other Americans have been over the years, as a shelter behind which the Bush administration's incompetent leaders can shield themselves from criticism.