Peacekeeping vs. Warfighting
Peacekeeping vs. warfighting. Or, why I would rather be an Iraqi civilian in Fallujah than Darfur Sudanese.
The UN Security Council authorized the deployment of 10,000 peacekeepers to southern Sudan, but remains stalemated on the question of help for the Darfur region. There are 3,000 African Union peacekeepers there, but they keep no peace. The ethnic Arab Janjaweed militia, a subsidiary of the Khartoum government, has been attacking the black Muslim population of Darfur at will.
Peacekeeping vs. warfighting. Or, why I would rather be an Iraqi civilian in Fallujah than Darfur Sudanese.
The UN Security Council authorized the deployment of 10,000 peacekeepers to southern Sudan, but remains stalemated on the question of help for the Darfur region. There are 3,000 African Union peacekeepers there, but they keep no peace. The ethnic Arab Janjaweed militia, a subsidiary of the Khartoum government, has been attacking the black Muslim population of Darfur at will.
At the UN, the French tried to put the U.S. between a rock and a hard place by submitting a proposal to haul the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide before the International Criminal Court – a court whose jurisdiction the U.S. does not recognize because it violates the U.S. Constitution. The plan was to have us either vote with the resolution, supplying de facto recognition to the Court, or veto it, appearing indifferent to the suffering of the people of Darfur. On the other hand, the fact that we don’t actually HAVE the perpetrators at the moment and haven’t dispatched anyone to capture them – makes the availability of an acceptable tribunal ready to receive them a moot point.
There is nothing new in the UN entangling itself in moot points and it would be ironic to watch the diplomats dither, except for the estimated 10,000 deaths each month in Darfur, more than 180,000 in total. At this point, the UN would do much better to authorize the deployment of 10,000 warfighters than peacekeepers for this Darfur.
Resolutions, peacekeepers and promises of court-ordered justice are palliative at best and do nothing to resolve the problem of defenseless people being killed by armed people intent on their destruction. So, as long as people are dying, we prefer that it be the bad guys. The people of Darfur do not need more ineffectual peacekeepers to surround the refugee camps while the Janjaweed wreak havoc. They need to be rescued; the Janjaweed need to be stopped. Killing enough of them to stop their depredations would, in fact, be the height of humanitarian aid.
At the two-year anniversary of the war in Iraq, it is useful to remember that the world warned a priori about the impending dire humanitarian disaster: refugees, starvation, disease, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, wreckage of the economy. Iraq isn’t yet a vacation spot, but there is no starvation or rampant disease; there are no refugee camps; the Iraqi economy is humming; and the marshes of southern Iraq (drained by Saddam as punishment with the water used to fill artificial lakes at his Baghdad palaces) are being restored, sustaining the ancient Marsh Arab culture. The schools and universities are open and brave people thronged the polling places to give voice to their aspirations.
Yes, we killed people – Iraqi soldiers, mainly, but also Iraqi civilians – and yes, there is terrorism ongoing. But deciding who performed the greater humanitarian mission, the United States military in Iraq or the African Union peacekeepers backed by the UN and the French threat of a future war crimes trial in Sudan, isn’t even a close call.