Darfur and howling at the moon.

Sadly, I think the guys at TAPPED are pretty much right about TNR's Darfur issue. There's a lot of (interesting) history, a lot of theory, a lot of context, a lot of complaint, a lot of rage, and no non-theoretical solutions -- nothing, for instance, to rival the substance of Marc Leon Goldberg's recent piece outlining the non-troop alternatives, including a Kosovo-like intervention from the air, or a threat to hit Sudanese military technology if the killing doesn't stop. (That's assuming Khartoum has the same direct control over the militias that Milosevic did over the army.) The Editors don't even attempt a serious rebuttal of the liberal doves' argument that an American military presence in Sudan is undesirable or impossible.

Really, though, the choice of theory over wonkery isn't so damning in itself... there's lots of good stuff in the issue. But the lack of specific substance seems to me part of the larger weirdness of the Western intellectual response to Darfur: the unwillingness to confront the total screaming irrelevance of all the outrage. Eric Reeves, writing about Darfur's future in the TNR Darfur issue gets at the heart of it:

The attacks were comprehensive and revealed a rich understanding of what was most likely to destroy the future ability of African groups to live in Darfur. Irrigation systems were destroyed; water wells were poisoned with human and animal corpses; pottery vessels were broken to make carrying water impossible; foodstocks were annihilated; cattle were killed or looted; fruit trees were cut down or burned; agricultural tools were smashed; mosques and Korans were desecrated; buildings were torched. And, of course, people were displaced, raped, and killed. Estimates of how many have died vary, but my calculations place the number well over 400,000. Many of the survivors now live in camps for refugees and internally displaced persons, both in eastern Chad and Darfur. Separated from their livelihoods, they are wholly dependent for survival on humanitarian organizations (which are forever on the brink of having to leave for lack of money, lack of security, or both). They arrived in the camps with nothing, and they have nothing to go back to.


The pillaging in Darfur has been going on for almost three years at this point -- and over all this time, there's been essentially no lack of editorializing (from the left and right), political interest in Congress, or effective, targetted grassroots activism. Samantha Power points all this out in her essay suggesting that American public interest is what prompted the leading, if weak, U.S. role in confronting the Darfur genocide. But her line of thinking -- what actually works?, how do we get more of it? -- is pretty mmuch lost elsewhere in the issue. The fact is, in its broadest form -- the tragedy of the killing and the need to stop it -- Darfur isn't an issue on which left-liberals and liberal hawks, or activists and intellectuals ostensibly disagree. The search for public intellectual villains is a fairly futile one. Official elected villians are easier to find, but, outside of Sudan or maybe South Africa, even they seem in somewhat short supply relative to the nature of the atrocity. Marisa Katz' article makes the startling half-accusation that the Republican establishment has downplayed a solution in Darfur at least partly as a way of favouring the resolution of Christian persecution in the south at the expense of Muslem suffering in the west of Sudan. But, mainly, the reasons for inaction from the Bush Administration are startlingly mundane and unsurprising: suitable for the sharp policy critique Katz gives it rather than the sputtering disgust and outrage engendered by the Clintonites' feckless, then ass-covering, approach to the flash-violence of Rwanda.

If anything, the recent breakthrough in negotiations makes TNR's continuing outrage all the more hollow. Not because diplomacy paid off undermining The Editors' demands for some sort of military solution, but for exactly the opposite reason. In Sudan, just like in Rwanda, it was the finalizing of one peace agreement (in Sudan's case, between the Khartoum-based government and southern-based rebels) that facilitated the movement toward a new conflict -- with Khartoum newly determined to ensure that one successful rebellion didn't perpetrate another, and holding up its part of the peace agreement, and other goodies like help in the WoT, as leverage against Western intervention. Three years later, if the Sudanese government and (most of) the main African rebel groups have, in fact, come to a lasting agreement (a debatable prospect), it's more likely because they figured they may as well: from Khartoum's perspective, the damange to the agricultural Darfuri tribal culture is already done. Genocides can't go on forever, but apparently, once started, they pretty much stop on their own time.

I don't mean to say there's no place for outrage. But three solid years of it produced nothing, and as TNR's editors fire off another round of prosy accusations -- domestic liberals betraying liberalism, squishes who fear American power, indecently hardassed Republican realists, incompetent Bushies, crooked, self-praising diplomats, self-interested Security Council members -- they ought to include their own advocacy as an equal partner in ineffectuality. The heart of the political issue isn't -- as Richard Just puts it, that some progressives "want Darfur saved and they want American power curbed, [and] they cannot have both". The Editors dream of a world in which that sort of thing is the essential question. But in our world, next to the basic ineffecuality of everyone, of every political stripe, to stop the killing, it's just the ultimate strawman. For three years now the conscience of the West (at least North America) has hummed along in apparent overdrive with regard to Darfur. The Bushies responded here and there to political pressure. And lo, the conflict in the Sudan continued unabated. The louder the rage, the demand for better philosophy and better protests, the more obvious the impotence behind it all. In this case, sadness, resignation is at least honest.