TOP SECRET - What a "sensitive war" looks like. Liberals Hate
America!
August 13, 2004, 8:56 a.m.
Top Secret
What a "sensitive war" looks like.
Remember John Kerry's "secret plan" for dealing with Iraq? He
announced it on ABC's This Week. Everybody wanted to know what it was.
It turns out it was just like the "secret plans" I had back in high
school when I'd take girls to the drive-in: Once the wraps came off,
everybody felt pretty stupid.
Kerry's secret plan, it finally emerged, was to convince France and
the U.N. to help us get out of Iraq. To you and me, asking France to
help you win a war is like asking your mother-in-law to help settle a
family quarrel. But according to Kerry, asking France to help win a
war makes the war "sensitive" because, as everyone knows, France is
more sensitive than the United States, just as liberals are more
sensitive than conservatives. In fact, to be liberal is to be French,
even if only in spirit.
For a good example of how a sensitive, Frenchified foreign policy
works, let's look at the warring, unhappy natives in faraway Darfur, a
dusty stretch of the Sudanese way-outback. According to the U.S.
Congress, there's a genocide going on in Darfur, and if we apply John
Kerry's secret plan, it's all being handled just right.
In Darfur, Arab killers, backed by the Sudanese government, are
cleansing the province of blacks by attacking villages, where they
loot, rape, abduct, then ride off. Meanwhile, the blacks, who survive
on desert shrubs, run for their lives. This has gone on for a very
long time. Although resistant to resolution, one of the few respites
from slavery, rape, and cruelty the Darfurians, or whatever they call
themselves, have enjoyed was in 1877, when a great Christian hero,
Charles George "Chinese" Gordon, at the time the governor general of
Sudan, arrived to suppress a conflict very much like the one raging
there now. Except Gordon arrived alone on a camel, smoking a cheroot
and demanding a prompt surrender. He got it.
Gordon was not French. He was, however, later killed at Khartoum by
Islamic fundamentalists when the British government failed to find the
nerve to save him. He thus became an historical figure of such
magnitude that it took Charlton Heston to play him). Darfur however
instantly returned to its hellish ways.
About two years ago, this long-running conflict appeared likely to
eventually morph into an Ethiopian-scale disaster, something that
would require the intervention of, like, rock stars or something if
disaster were to be averted. For months, NGOs and various U.N.
agencies, along with the Bush administration, kept warning that things
were going to go very south in Darfur.
When the number of displaced reached a million or so, and when the
dead numbered in the tens of thousands, and when the victims of rape
and mutilation could no longer be counted at all, and when the entire
population stood at the brink of starvation, and when all the rock
stars were busy planning to go out pimping for Kerry, the U.S. did
what John Kerry says we should always in order to wage a more
sensitive campaign for democracy and justice. America went to the U.N.
The Daily Telegraph reported that the U.S. secretary of State stood in
the middle of a big Sudanese nowhere, spoke softly, and threatened the
killers with the big Nerf stick: knock it off, he said, or face the
wrath of the U.N.
For weeks, while more and more people were being kicked and killed in
Darfur, the Security Council debated just what should be done to
convince the government of Sudan to stop supporting the Janjaweed
militia, the band of Muslim brothers responsible for the slaughter.
The U.S. wanted to move decisively, but the resolution offered by the
Bush administration went off the tracks because it contained the word
"sanctions." "Sanctions" is not a sensitive word. The reporting in the
French-leaning press - which would include theNew York Times and the
Boston Globe, as well as the Times's expat paper, the International
Herald Tribune - was thorough enough. Reporters such as the Times's
Warren Hoge, whose piece ran in the IHT (now archived), covered the
debate carefully - except for one stray fact that somehow escaped
attention: Who on the Security Council had objected to the word
"sanctions" and thrown the process into the slow lane? And why?
I'll spoil the suspense here, because you already know the answer. It
was the French, of course. To discover that fact on the same day
Hoge's piece ran, you had to catch a tiny (and alas now archived) item
in the Frankfurter Allgemeine explaining that France, along with her
allies, Russia and China, was guilty not just of trading blood for
oil, as the French are always saying about the U.S., but trading "oil
for corpses." The Sudan sits on what some experts think is a pool of
oil the size of Araby, practically. And, as the BBC later nearly
misreported - and Instapundit explains here how - the French have an
oil deal with Sudan, just as they did with the Iraqis. It took nearly
a month - until July 30 - for the Security Council to issue its
toothless warning: The sanctions were removed and replaced with a
threat to maybe impose them later. The government of Sudan
dismissedthe resolution as illogical and impractical. As Mark Steyn,
writing in the Telegraph, had predicted, Sudan was "getting away with
murder."
And they'll continue to get away with it, because he sanctions won't
happen. In fact, to make sure of that, the Guardian says, the EU
looked into it, then announced that they'd thought it over and yes,
things were not nice in Darfur, but despite what the U.S. Congress had
said, what was happening in Darfur wasn't an actual genocide. The EU
would know. A genocide is the kind of thing the French helped engineer
and arm and cover-up in Rwanda in 1994 - merely to show support to a
Francophone regime. If Darfur were a certified genocide, then
international agreements would require the EU to actually do
something. That is not the EU's sensitive way. So, as of this week, as
Donna Hughes wrote Thursday in NRO, nothing had changed in Darfur -
and, as long as the French and the U.N. have a say, nothing will
change there in the immediate future - unless it's to make matters
worse: As the BBC reports today, hepatitis has broken out in the
refuge camps.
Darfur is the kind of foreign policy the United States would have if
it followed the "secret plan" of John Kerry and catered to the French
and German politicians who seemingly crave Bush's defeat. If the
French and the U.N. had had their way in Iraq, Saddam Hussein would
still be tossing his people to his hungry wolf-boys and looking for a
way to get back at the U.S. And who knows? Perhaps by now he would
have been successful.
The French-tastic press in New York and Boston, like the actual French
press in downtown France, obviously prefers the U.N.'s Darfur solution
over Bush and Blair's Iraq solution - just as the French and the
Germans, reports the IHT, prefer Kerry to Bush. The French certainly
want no more Chinese Gordons - or even Colin Powells, for that matter
- running around Sudanese oil fields making trouble. They know what
they do want, and what they want is what they know.
In Darfur, they want everybody to chill. Thus, Michel Barnier, the
French foreign minister, plays the humanitarian poseur in the pages of
Le Figaro today. His four action items: Look for an African way to fix
it [sic], encourage dialogue, encourage more dialogue, congratulate
France for its forward-looking policies.
In Iraq, they want quagmire. Thus, French-ish correspondents, like one
named Anne Barnard, writing for the Boston Globe (and carried in the
IHT) hang out, turn up their Jimi, and send back stories straight out
of Da Nang, '68 - just like in the movies.
Here's a secret plan: Every time you think it can't get worse in Iraq,
take a look at Darfur.
ITEMS
More secret plans. The U.N.'s Oil-for-Food scam that made Saddam
ridiculously rich while the U.N. looked on has finally come to the
attention of the IHT, via the New York Times. My favorite quote:
"Everyone said it was a terrible shame..."
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