Appeasement For Oil

Fresh from his fiction maligning the memory of John Lennon, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal concocts more delusions today (you can always count on the WSJ for totally “through-the-looking-glass” editorial commentary).

Stephens spends most of his column listing all of the ways that Congress has actually had to lead Dubya on the issue of the genocide in Darfur after rightly praising Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe for standing up to Robert Mugabe’s thuggery. Unbelievably, Stephens then tells us that this goal of “embrac(ing) the responsibility to protect, wherever necessary and feasible”…”come(s) oddly close to The Bush Doctrine” (lumping both the Zimbabwe and Sudan crises together; he even throws in Burma later for good measure.)

(Putting aside his wingnuttery, I must tell you that Stephens is a truly bad editorial writer. It seems as if he is trying to hit too many targets at once – in this case, Congress and Barack Obama for entirely separate reasons – to the point that it destroys the threads of coherent thought in his argument that actually exist.)

To say that Stephens misrepresents the Bush Doctrine here is an understatement. As Wikipedia tells us here…

The Bush Doctrine is a phrase used to describe various related foreign policy principles of United States president George W. Bush, created in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The phrase initially described the policy that the United States had the right to treat countries that harbor or give aid to terrorist groups as terrorists themselves, which was used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan.[1] Later it came to include additional elements, including the controversial policy of preventive war, which held that the United States should depose foreign regimes that represented a threat to the security of the United States, even if that threat was not immediate (used to justify the invasion of Iraq), a policy of supporting democracy around the world, especially in the Middle East, as a strategy for combating the spread of terrorism, and a willingness to pursue U.S. military interests in a unilateral way.[2][3][4] Some of these policies were codified in a National Security Council text entitled the National Security Strategy of the United States published on September 20, 2002.[5]

Or, with fewer words, here is what the Bush Doctrine represents as stated by Wikipedia: shoot first, ask questions later, and then after you’ve made an utter mess, ask someone else to engage in diplomacy for you to try and fix it.

And Stephens, after actually listing all the ways Congress has stepped up on Darfur absent actual presidential leadership (and believe it or not, I’m going back to the 109th a bit on this too), unbelievably states that a “rubric (called) ‘Responsibility To Protect’” justified by Obama adviser Susan Rice reflects an “inherent paternalism (that) has hitherto inhibited many liberals from endorsing the kinds of interventions toward which they are now tip-toeing, thousands of deaths too late.”

OK, now for the reality-based perspective.

This BBC story from last February shows Commander Codpiece crowing as follows…

US President George W Bush has defended his decision not to send troops to the Sudanese region of Darfur, despite what he calls a genocide taking place there.

He called it a "seminal decision" not to intervene with force, taken partly out of the desire not to send US troops into another Muslim country.

I actually agree with that decision, if for no other reason because our military is hopelessly overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, primarily. However, there’s just a bit more going on in what passes for Dubya’s decision making here.

This post featuring a story by author David Morse from 2006 (the post states that, at that time, he was writing a book about Darfur) tells us that the latest misery in the Sudan actually began back in 1989 when the National Islamist Front (NIF) seized control in a military coup and installed Lt. Gen. Omar al-Bashir. Subsequently, that country became “an incubator for international terrorists” in the 1990s, including bin Laden of course.

As Morse tells us…

Here, in short, is a totalitarian regime with significant parallels to Nazi Germany, even if hardly on the same economic or military scale. It is also a regime arguably more murderous than that of Saddam Hussein, with a more expansionist agenda; a rogue state that has sponsored terrorism in the past and threatens to launch a jihad if the UN intervenes in Darfur. Earlier this year, Osama bin Laden issued a world-wide call for terrorists to go to the aid of Khartoum. Sudan has bona fide -- not fabricated -- ties to al-Qaeda. Khartoum is, in other words, everything Mr. Bush could wish for in an "Islamo-fascist" enemy.

So let’s move up to 2004; Dubya gives a speech to the UN, stating that the crimes in the Darfur region of the Sudan are “genocide.” However, after the 2004 election, Bushco “fell silent” on Darfur, as Morse states, while the genocide continued and Khartoum stopped granting visas to keep the carnage out of the public eye.

And as a result…

Without leadership from the Oval Office, Congress spent most of 2005 dickering over the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act. In its original version, the bipartisan bill had formidable teeth. It provided a broad new set of sanctions, in addition to the existing Clinton-era ones which had been limited to trade. The new sanctions would have put the U.S. government on record as seeking a UN resolution embargoing arms sales to Sudan, establishing a no-fly zone over Darfur, seeking unspecified measures affecting "the petroleum sector in Sudan," and guaranteeing humanitarian aid workers' access to those suffering in Darfur. Even more to the point, additional sanctions would target individuals in the Khartoum government who were responsible for the genocide, freezing their assets abroad and imposing travel restrictions on them -- exactly the sort of hamstringing that (men such as al-Bashir) fear, especially if they are likely to be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court.

Taken together, these powerful sanctions, if approved by Congress and then adopted by the UN Security Council might conceivably have stopped the genocide in its tracks. Whether it all could have gotten past the Security Council is questionable. Russia and China are selling weapons to Sudan; China, Britain, and France are heavily involved in exploiting its oil resources. Indeed, considering that U.S. firms were already prevented from trading with Sudan under the 1997 sanctions, such a resolution from the U.S. might have appeared self-serving.

But the relevant question is this: Did President Bush support the bill?

The answer is: Quite the opposite. Under pressure from the White House, virtually all the sanctions were seriously weakened or eliminated in Congressional committee. The reference to a possible embargo aimed at the petroleum sector was deleted. The provisions for targeting individuals were replaced by a single provision giving the President discretion to refer individual war criminals to the International Criminal Court, a highly unlikely prospect considering the administration's hostility to the ICC. In its final form, the bill was toothless. It offered modest funding -- guilt money -- to the under-funded African Union mission in Darfur, and little else.

Ah, but guess what ends up changing the whole dynamic of our relationship with Khartoum? You probably already know…

Until April 2005, it was said that whatever oil deposits existed in Darfur were confined to its southeastern corner. However, new seismographic studies brought a surprise. On April 19, 2005, Mohamed Siddig, a spokesman for the Sudan Energy Ministry, announced that a new high-yield well had been drilled in North Darfur -- several hundred kilometers northwest of the existing fields. Seismographic studies indicated that a huge basin of oil, expected to yield up to 500,000 barrels of crude per day, lay in the area. This Darfur discovery effectively doubled Sudan's oil reserves.

…

The Bush administration had already been developing a closer relationship with Khartoum, based (it was claimed) on the sharing of intelligence about potential operations in the President's Global War on Terror. The announcement of the new find in April 2005 seemed to accelerate these efforts, and may explain why, a month later, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a jet to Khartoum to ferry Sudan's chief of intelligence, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, to a clandestine meeting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

The Morse story also tells us that the Langley meeting provoked “a political tempest,” and as a result, Our Gal Condi Rice had to issue a statement saying that we sought “closer ties” with Khartoum because of its cooperation in the “war on terrorism.”

So, Bushco’s “policy” on the Darfur crisis, if you could call it that, ranged from ignorance of the catastrophe altogether despite public outcry from Colin Powell, among others, to making a speech rightly calling it genocide in 2004 prior to the election (though, in “meaning of the word ‘is’” fashion, they backpedaled in 2005, with lackey Robert Zoellick referring to “crimes against humanity” instead to tie the hands of the U.N.), to ignoring it after the election, and finally, to seeking conciliation with the regime responsible for the suffering because additional oil reserves were discovered.

And short of pre-emptive war, I believe the preceding paragraph, finally, in all of its caveats and admittedly confusing construction, provides the best (updated) description of the “Bush Doctrine” that you could ever hope to find.