Darfur and Pelosi's ignorance

Opinion Journal:

The killing in Darfur province of Sudan is terrible, but as a foreign policy problem it is also instructive. In particular, it is exposing the weakness of a strand of U.S. foreign-policy thinking that might be called the Pelosi Doctrine, after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Darfur is the Sudanese province where Arab Janjaweed militia supported by the Khartoum government has murdered an estimated 200,000 mostly black Muslims and displaced another two million. President Bush has requested $439 million in humanitarian aid, proposed a NATO mission to the area (an idea our European allies instantly shot down) and is now pushing for a U.N. peacekeeping contingent to replace the ineffectual forces of the African Union, as well as targeted U.N. sanctions against Sudan's leadership.

As an alternative, consider Ms. Pelosi's position. She has made Darfur a personal priority, demanding action and, to her credit, joining a recent Congressional delegation to Darfur and Khartoum to meet with Vice President Ali Taha, who denied there was anything much amiss. Ms. Pelosi described her experiences with obvious sincerity from the House floor recently. Then she offered this: The Administration must appoint a special envoy to Sudan as a way of "[signaling] that bringing peace and stability to Sudan is a priority of the United States."

...

Then again, the record of most other "special envoys" has not been promising. Cyrus Vance, David Owen, Peter Carrington and countless other worthies trooped through Belgrade in the early '90s, trying to make Slobodan Milosevic "see reason" as Serbian troops massacred civilians in Vukovar, Sarajevo and Srebrenica. Milosevic rightly interpreted this brand of diplomacy-by-signals as evidence the West lacked the political will to stop the killing, which would have meant stopping him.

Yet this is exactly what Ms. Pelosi now proposes to do with Khartoum. The job of the special envoy, she says, is to find ways to "stop the violence, bring the people to the negotiating table and get humanitarian relief to the people who need it." These are contradictory goals. Bringing "people" to the table means giving Sudan's government--the perpetrator of the genocide--a seat and thus a veto over how and when the Darfur crisis is resolved. It is Khartoum that is the chief obstacle to deploying U.N. troops in the region.

...

A lack of envoys is not the reason that the genocide has not stopped. The genocide is the policy of the Sudan goverment. It is part of its war strategy. That is why humanitarian aid will not work, because itis contrary to Sudan's policy of extermination. This famine is man made, for the purpose of genocide. The genocide will stop when either goverment achieves its objective or it is defeated by an outside force. Pelosi has not endorsed doing anything that effective. Read the rest of the piece.