The latest rallying cry among the college-aged generation in activism is the Save Darfur coalition. College campuses around the US, including Miami University, have been the sites of Save Darfur protests and events geared toward raising awareness about the Darfur conflict. Yet the same crowd clamoring for U.S. military involvement in a United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur are the very same people loudly protesting the ongoing war in Iraq and many even have gone as far as endorsing an immediate and unconditional withdraw of U.S. troops from the country. While one may proclaim these two current conflicts to be an apples to oranges comparison, the parallels are quite striking when one analyzes the similarities.
As in the sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shi'ites in Iraq, the fighting is exclusively among Muslims in the Darfur region as well. The Janjaweed, with obvious support from the Sudanese government, are composed of Arab Baggara tribes carrying out military attacks against the Justice and Equality Movement and Sudan Liberation Movement-a loose coalition of non-Baggard Muslims yearning for political self-determination and some form of power sharing with the Sudanese government. Not surprisingly, the Sudanese government considers the conflict to be primarily a tribal one focused not on political power but a lack of natural resources and land scarcity brought on by severe drought in recent years.
The figures of death are unbelievably staggering-180,000 deaths and 2 million displaced refugees fleeing to the neighboring country of Chad. These statistics are endlessly cited as convincing reasons for the US to use its military strength and support an end to the genocide being practiced in Darfur. But in the shadow of such genocide, one cannot help but think what the consequences of an immediate withdrawal of US troops would have on the Iraqi population. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has predicted such a strategy would result in chaos and genocide. If the US has a moral obligation to involve itself in Darfur to prevent genocide, then it seems inevitable and fairly certain that the US has an even greater moral obligation to prevent genocide in Iraq-where a political vacuum was created-for better or worse-largely by the US military through invading the country.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, takes a bizarre and contradictory approach to the separate issues of Darfur and Iraq. In a July interview with The Associated Press, Obama said the rise of potential genocide between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq was not a sound enough reason to keep troops in Iraq. His backwards answer to such a scenario is that the U.S. should then be stationing troops in Darfur. But that policy significantly resembles what Obama desires-Western military "advisers" under the guise of a UN peacekeeping force invading a sovereign country to bring peace and stability. It sounds as if Obama is plagiarizing paragraphs of the Bush Doctrine-only applying it to the part of the globe his supporters are recently concerned with.
Sudan has made it clear that their government would view any UN peacekeeping force in Darfur as an invading force. Resolution 1706 passed the UN General Assembly Aug. 31, 2006 but the Sudanese refused to allow a UN peacekeeping force enter the country. Obama's and others' calls for increased support for a UN peacekeeping appear fruitless when Sudan would never permit such a force to enter Darfur. The U.S. is in a unique military situation to prevent genocide in Iraq and calls for withdrawal there only to prevent genocide elsewhere would hurt the United States' credibility in the Middle East far more than whatever George W. Bush has done as President. Perhaps U.S. military involvement in Darfur will ultimately prove necessary, but such a move would only strengthen the argument of maintaining a strong military presence in Iraq as well.
