Regarding hoisting and petards and Sudan

Posted By Peter Feaver Monday, October 19, 2009 - 2:12 PM Share

By Peter Feaver

Will's measured analysis of Team Obama's Sudan policy is kind. Perhaps too kind. From my vantage point, today's Sudan rollout has all the feel of a group being hoisted with their own petard, in this case the bombast of their campaign rhetoric. And precisely because it was all so foreseeable, perhaps this counts as a teachable moment.

The two protagonists, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice and Sudan czar Scott Gration, had key roles during the 2008 presidential campaign. In particular, their job was to peddle the meme that Barack Obama could be trusted on national security because he was going to be even tougher than George W. Bush or John McCain when push came to shove. Gration, a retired Air Force general, was trotted out to participate in one of the more remarkable attacks on Senator McCain -- a series of retired military people floating the notion that McCain was temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief, a not-so-subtle effort to play off of the notion that McCain's time as a PoW may have left him unhinged. Gration put it this way: "I have tremendous respect for John McCain, but I would not follow him."

Ambassador Rice, for her part, was especially barbed on the issue of Sudan: "The Bush administration has spent years not only talking at very senior levels with one of the world's worst tyrants, who is responsible for genocide, but also reportedly offered the regime major concessions in exchange for minor steps and rolled out the red carpet for some of its most reprehensible officials." She didn't mention "gold stars and cookies," but she might as well have.

The notion that President Obama was going to be more hawkish on Darfur than President Bush should have been easy to dismiss from the outset. For years, President Bush was the single person in his administration most passionately committed to the Sudan issue (first the North-South civil war and then the Darfur genocide). If memory serves, he would raise it in his bilaterals with other world leaders even when his staff had not included it in the briefing materials. He regularly pressed the staff to come up with viable ways to move the Darfur issue along. Yet we were unable to make as much progress as the president wanted for several reasons: (1) our nonmilitary coercive diplomacy toolkit was already heavily utilized on Sudan; (2) our military coercive diplomacy toolkit was fully extended in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and (3) the global balance of resolve heavily favored those backing the Khartoum regime (what we called Khartoum's "heat shield") and not our weakly committed allies.

The Obama campaign made it sound like the problem was with President Bush. With today's roll-out, the Obama administration is conceding that the problems actually lay elsewhere and they have proven just as insurmountable for President Obama as they were for President Bush. Perhaps it is time for a different kind of apology tour.

EXPLORE:AFRICA, BUSH ADMINISTRATION, OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, SUDAN, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
 

ZATHRAS

6:04 PM ET

October 19, 2009

Darfur

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.

 

WOLFBOY

11:30 AM ET

October 20, 2009

I actually think you may be

I actually think you may be right on the general thrust of this post, Dr. Feaver (I have not studied this in detail).

You go too far, however, in suggesting that Gration was trying to insinuate "that McCain's time as a PoW may have left him unhinged."

Gration's full quote at the link you provide does not support this interpretation:

"I studied leadership for a long time during 32 years in the military," said retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, a one-time Republican who is supporting Obama. "It is all about character. Who can motivate willing followers? Who has the vision? Who can inspire people?" Gration asked. "I have tremendous respect for John McCain, but I would not follow him."

Please tell me how one could offer a criticism of McCain's leadership abilities without engaging in what you would deem "a not-so-subtle effort to play off of the notion that McCain's time as a PoW may have left him unhinged."

 

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.

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