[Peace-discuss] Info re. Darfur/Sudan/Somalia

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following excerpts are from a long article that puts the Darfur 
issue into the context of US foreign policy since 2001.  The whole 
article is worth looking at it, if only to guard against ignoring the 
range and continuity of that policy. --CGE]

	“We're Taking Down Seven Countries in Five Years”:
	A Regime Change Checklist
	by Gary Leupp
	www.dissidentvoice.org
	January 17, 2007

Last October in a speech at the University of Alabama Gen. Wesley Clark 
again recounted his conversation with a general at the Pentagon in 
November 2001.

	I said, "Are we still going to invade Iraq?" "Yes, Sir," he
  	said, "but it's worse than that." I said, "How do you mean?" He
	held up this piece of paper. He said, "I just got this memo
	today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense
	upstairs. It's a, it's a five-year plan. We're going to take
	down seven countries in five years. We're going to start with
	Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we're
	going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, "Is that
	classified, that paper?" He said, "Yes Sir." I said, "Well,
	don't show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about
	it."

{Leupp then proceeds to consider those seven countries seriatim.]

...

How about Sudan? Here's where a humanitarian argument comes in . . . 
rather like it did in 1992, when the first President Bush sent in troops 
to help the starving Somalis but wound up generating widespread outrage. 
Here the neocons build bridges to the naive liberals prone to sport 
placards pleading, "Out of Iraq, Into Darfur!" at antiwar 
demonstrations. If you want to take down Sudan's government, it's 
helpful to vilify it as much as possible. If you can depict a conflict 
between Sudanese herders and agriculturalists as one between 
government-backed Arab terrorists (the Janjaweed militia) and black 
African targets of genocide (as Colin Powell did publicly in September 
2004), conjuring up images of the Holocaust, so much the better. The 
fact of the matter is that the Sudanese government has signed ceasefire 
and power-sharing agreements with rebel forces in January, July, and 
October 2002, May 2004, January and June 2005, and May 2006. From August 
2004 it has accepted an African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, now 
numbering about 7000 troops. In December 2006 it agreed to accept the 
deployment of UN troops in Darfur as part of an expanded peacekeeping 
force.

John Bolton had crusaded at the United Nations for that UN force. But 
Khartoum has little reason to suppose Bolton is an honest broker when it 
comes to its internal affairs. In October 2005, he actually blocked a 
special UN envoy from briefing the UN Security Council about the 
situation in Darfur, declaring that the council already knew enough to 
take action.

Bolton proposed the UN force be augmented by NATO troops -- a suggestion 
naturally rejected by a regime on the American hit list. Nevertheless, 
after much arm-twisting by Bolton, the UNSC unanimously passed 
Resolution 1679 in May 2006 calling for the African Union force to be 
replaced by a UN force in Sudan, and Bolton interprets the resolution as 
validating NATO involvement. The resolution calls upon the AU and all 
parties involved to "agree with" and "work with" not just the UN but 
"international and regional organizations."

In a May 16, 2006 news conference Bolton made himself clear: "Regional 
organization means NATO.  There's not the slightest doubt in anybody's 
mind what it means."

It sounds as though Cheney and his neocons are eager to get NATO's foot 
in the door. (Bolton's on record, by the way, as advocating Israel's 
admission into that expanding body.)

Exploitation of the Darfur situation and other conflicts could 
conceivably lead to regime change in Africa's largest country. But 
China, heavily invested in Sudan's oil industry and cozy with the 
regime, has generally opposed outside intervention. And nasty though 
Khartoum and the Janjaweed militia might be, Sudan hasn't been high on 
the U.S.'s regime change list.

...

Gary Leupp is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of 
Comparative Religion, at Tufts University and author of numerous works 
on Japanese history. He can be reached at: gleupp at granite.tufts.edu.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan07/Leupp17.htm

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