Obama’s Weakness, Sudan’s Tragedy
When an empire falls, it’s not only Rome that burns: some of the worst shockwaves hit the peripheries, the former client states and once-loyal allies. Note the Yugoslav wars after the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the Indo-Pakistani wars that followed British withdrawal.
The three wars ongoing in Sudan and its borderlands — in Darfur, Blue Nile state, and the Nuba Mountains — are connected to a broad show of U.S. weakness in the Obama years. The evacuation of American embassy workers from Khartoum on September 15 came as a dramatic reminder of the decline of American standing in the country, and was all the more humiliating for the public snub that the Sudanese foreign minister sent Hillary Clinton in rejecting her request to deploy Marines at the embattled embassy.
President Obama’s retreat from Sudan began earlier with his acceptance of the expulsion of U.S.-funded aid agencies from Darfur in 2009; America’s endorsement of the rigged 2010 general election; and compromise on the 2011 Abyei Referendum for which the U.S. had signed on as guarantor.
The president’s diffidence marks an about-face from a decade-long U.S. surge in the Sudan. The superpower’s erratic but forceful entrée began after the East Africa embassy bombings of 1998. Under the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, U.S. power helped change the face of militant political Islam in the country and led to its ultimate defeat in southern Sudan. These presidents used sanctions, direct military action, and diplomacy to achieve their ends. They offered material and moral support to armed liberation movements and pro-democracy groups, and they compelled Khartoum to stop harboring terrorists.
President George W. Bush sent as envoys men whom he respected and trusted, including former senator John Danforth, former USAID director Andrew Natsios, and one of his more experienced foreign policy advisors, Richard Williamson. These envoys helped broker a peace agreement between Khartoum and the U.S.-backed southern rebels, forced Sudan to accept UN peacekeepers in Darfur, and managed one of the world’s largest sustained relief efforts.
By contrast, President Obama’s envoy — retired Air Force General Scott Gration — proposed to lift economic sanctions, endorsed an undemocratic election, and asked southerners to accept the division of Abyei rather than carry out the referendum guaranteed under the peace agreement Danforth had brokered. In 2011 Gration was named ambassador to Kenya, where his year-long tenure was “divisive and ineffective” according to a scathing 68-page report recently published by the Office of the Inspector General. Out of 80 diplomatic chiefs of mission inspected, “the Ambassador ranked last for interpersonal relations, next to last on both managerial skill and attention to morale, and third from last in his overall scores from surveys of mission members,” the inspector general found.
Under the guarantee of the Bush administration, secessionist South Sudan won the right to a share of oil revenues. This was the economic incentive to prevent a return to war. The agreement put in place revenue-sharing arrangements for the period from 2005 to mid-2011.
During these years Sudan’s economy depended significantly on oil drilled in South Sudanese fields, while South Sudan needed Khartoum’s pipelines to export its oil to the Red Sea. A post-secession agreement that acknowledged these realities was needed for the period after South Sudan became independent in July 2011.
But there was no agreement. For years before Independence Day, the outlines of the coming crisis were clear: no oil deal, no peace, no prosperity. “We are once again staring into the abyss,” former White House envoy Richard Williamson wrote in Foreign Policy in November 2010, citing the “naiveté” of Obama and his advisors.
And the war came.
Africans fighting Arabs is nothing new in Africa. Neither is Christians and others fighting Muslims. BHO will support the Arabs/Muslims every time.
Help spread this story, it is a problem for Obama and his pals.
As Obama’s cover story comes down, the curtain goes up on the USAO’s cover-up of J.J., Jr.’s role in the Blago story
http://illinoispaytoplay.com/2012/10/05/as-obamas-cover-story-comes-down-the-curtain-goes-up-on-the-usaos-cover-up-of-j-j-jr-s-role-in-the-blago-story/
To fill in some of the details, the following link has my embedded policy paper on this very subject.
If interested, please see within the link – ‘Sudan:Getting It Right…A Western & Israeli Strategic Imperative’ – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/08/14/fungible-definition-of-who-is-a-terrorist-invariably-leads-to-support-of-islamists-in-syria-sudan-elsewhere-when-politicsideology-trumps-morality-embedded-policy-paper-commentary-by/
NO doubt, Barack HUSSEIN Obama, through benign neglect, as well as purposeful mishandling, is setting the region ablaze. There is a method to his madness…and it is anti-American in its scope!
What? No scheduled London rock concert to save Darfur? Where are all of those ankle bitters and heel nippers blaming the “genocide” in Darfur on the Bush administration? Where’s Michael Moore? Samantha Powers? Oh, that’s right, she’s busy, she just got the ambassador to Libya killed leading from behind, and Mikey’s working on a new movie, Romney 911:The Return of The Racists.
“militant political Islam”
Like there is any another kind of Islam?
“militant political Islam”
I suppose most Nazism wasn’t really militant or political either, just some small number of misunderstanders of Nazism and Mein Kampf.
America in a death spiral of terminal decline, “fundamental transformation” indeed.
Obama’s crimes and calamities regarding Dar ul Islam are an opportunity in disguise. It was high time for the Western world to reevaluate its entire relationship with the Islamic world. For decades we sought peace and stability in the ME, mainly in the hopes of securing a stable supply of affordable oil and gas. But long ago that hope went up in smoke. We have no stability, we have no peace, and we certainly don’t have affordable oil from this sewer of hatred.
There is plenty of oil and gas in the Western Hemisphere. The nations surrounding us are for the most part benign, and it would be far better to invest in securing peace and stability locally. Let the Muslim world expend their limitless rage and hatred on their fellow Muslims. Let Islamic wars deplete Islamic coffers, not ours. Strangling them of our money, our technology, and our protection would mean that the Islamic world could no longer wage Jihad globally. Leave Muslims to wallow in the sewer of their own creation. Or let the Russians and the Cinese manage these savages for a spell.
After 9/11, it was high time for the Western World to seriously reevaluate its entire relationship with Islam. But we failed to do that, and through sheer inertia, and through insane delusions and boondoggles like Responsibility To Protect, “Winning Their Hearts and Minds”, and idiotic nation building in hellholes like Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan, we have little to show but tens of thousands maimed, a trillion in debt, newly minted Jihadi nations, and ongoing, shattering betrayals.
Let Muslims rot. Let their evil house go up in flames.
That is precisely what ought to happen. The middle east oil is no longer a first order strategic concern for the US and really hasn’t been since the navy went nuclear half a century ago. Just as you say, let the Chinese administer the region and secure their own fuel supply. What other reason to stay? If the Israelis choose to survive rather than be annihilated good for them but it is their problem not ours. They are perfectly capable and amply equipped to do what has to be done to survive.
Genocide in Africa is not a problem under democrat administrations; just when there’s an R in the Oval Office. It’s no different than overseas military action, the plight of the homeless, AIDS, unemployment or high gas prices.
Meanwhile, flights of surveillance drones over the heartland have increased dramatically, in order to ensure American ranchers don’t allow their stock to encroach on protected wetlands.
It’s all about priorities.
Good comment.. dry wit here !!!
Good comment.. dry wit here !!!
We should just stay out of the mess in the Sudan. Half of these “countries” in Africa are just artificial representations on a map and never take into consideration tribal, ethnic, or religious divisions within those same “countries.” So unless you want to go into all of these homicidal basket cases and force governments on them that nobody in those countries seem to want (as in the Sudan), then just leave them alone and let them work it out. If they end up slaughtering each other, well then that’s really not our problem. It gets expensive being the world’s policeman and the war in Iraq should have taught us that bitter lesson. These people have been killing each other for literally hundreds of years. You’re not going to stop it with some scrap of paper from the United Nations. Let them, for once, solve their own problems. Personally, I’m sick and tired of seeing American diplomats trying to solve the world’s problems. That didn’t work out too well for us recently in Libya, and it’s not going to work much better in the Sudan.
Liberty, the mess in what is now the SUdan began under British COlonial rule, mid nineteenth century. It was they who scrmbled boundaries and people groups in their quest to subjugate (their favourite hat trick, if you read any history of their empire at all). There are a number of distinct ethnic groups in that “nation”, and at least three major representatioins of different religious faiths. The moslems are relatively late on the scene, have managed to usurp the lion’s share of power in the old capital, and have succeeded in conscripting huge numbers of tribesmen, many by simply pressing them into service.. many of them as young as fourteen. The recent “secession” of South Sudan fell along ethic and faith lines, pretty much, separating them from the violent moslem north, politically, more or less a return to pre-British conditions. It took them years to ward off continual military assaults upon their homes, lands, people, by the moslem north. The largel christian south sudanese, large numbers of them living in the Nuba Mountais for generations, were the first to have even a hint of success driving the moslem hordes back. I’ve seen photographs, narrated by their maker, depicting the insane atrocities of these wild animals in their attacks….. trying to eliminate them from off the face of the earth as they refused to “convert” to the moslem ways. Sorry, but the US government did little to really support these people. Darfur was mainly known because of the huge refugee camps there, their ossupants haveing fled from their generational homelands to the north, driven by the bloody swords of the moslem pillagers. It may well be that US withdrawal entirely from the region would lessen the level of “blowback” against the southerners for the temerity to “secede” from the “north”, taking their oil rich lands with them. Now they’ve got their independence, the moslem north are again tormenting them by denying them access to the transport of that oil to the world market. What WOULD be a profitable move for all involved would be for some private firm (as opposed to government with their ever-present agenda) to engage in building an alternate means of transport for that oil. Leave the rotten northerners to complete their rotting. The UN have consistently denied or frustrated any foreign relief efforts, seemingly taking up the cause of the moslem north.. no great surprise, given the members of the councils that decide such things. Some theory, that the UN is to protect the underdogs against the bullies, enforce treaties lawfully entered upon, and be neutral as regards things like religion, ethnicity, and so forth. The reality is rather “other”. And the South Sudanese suffer for it. And the US government seem to uphold whatever policies, however twisted, the UN put forth.
While I admire people like George Clooney who speak out in behalf of the people of Darfur, he is ultimately a coward because he won’t speak the truth as to the cause of the conflict. The truth is Sudan is another example of Muslim aggression. Clooney is also very naive if he thinks Obama cares a lick about the plight of the South Sudanese. Until he sheds the light on what actually happened in Sudan, Clooney will continue to be just another Hollywood Looney!