Rozen at AEI Sudan seminar

Laura Rozen attended the American Enterprise Institute's recent panel discussion Sudan: Genocide, Terrorism, and America's National Interest. From the AEI's pre-event announcement:

U.S. policy toward Sudan is at a crossroads. Although the authoritarian regime in Khartoum remains on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, concern about its continued association with jihadists has been balanced by post-9/11 pledges of cooperation against al Qaeda. But with the world’s worst humanitarian crisis unfolding in Darfur—a government-sponsored ethnic cleansing campaign by Arab militias—the United States and the international community are threatening sanctions, while Sudanese hardliners warn that foreign intervention will constitute an attack on Islam.

How does Sudan fit into the global war on terrorism? Does the United States have a strategic, as well as a moral, interest in the crisis in Darfur? What practical steps should the Bush administration take to stop the catastrophe there? What interests, principles, and strategy should guide U.S. policy toward Sudan in a post-9/11 world?

And Rozen's post-event summary:

I give the neocons a lot of flak; so it's only fair I point out that the American Enterprise Institute hosted a really superb event this morning on Darfur, that went so far beyond the coverage and the headlines, it educated people who think they know something about the situation.

AEI's top notch military analyst Tom Donnelly moderated a panel that included John Prendergrast of the International Crisis Group, Ronald Sandee of the Netherlands Ministry of Defense, William Kristol, and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA). Wolf is just back from a fact finding trip to Darfur; he showed a highly disturbing homemade video he and Sam Brownback took of their visit to the camps, of interviews with refugees and rape victims, you can see the actual Janjaweed on camels surrounding the camps, and see the utterly desolate burned villages. Most disturbing you can see and hear the roar of helicopters and planes that are being used to fly in the supplies the Janjaweed have used to kill almost 50,000 people and displace a million from their villages, which they then burn.

As Donnelly pointed out, no militia has a fleet of helicopters and fixed wing aircraft; that has all the earmarks of support of the central government in Khartoum.

Kristol pointed out, this is a humanitarian crisis caused by a political problem (the Khartoum government), not by say a natural disaster; therefore the solution must address not only the extraordinary humanitarian suffering, but the underlying political problem, perhaps ultimately by pursuing regime change, but in the interim by severe pressure on the Khartoum government.

Sandee made clear that Khartoum is truly a radical Islamist sponsor of terrorist groups, training camps, and atrocities, that has ties to all the baddies (Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, radical Islamist groups in Pakistan, etc.).

Prendergast said, you don't need lots of US or British troops; the Bush and Clinton administrations have trained African forces to do what's needed right now -- send in peace enforcement troops made up of the African Union, assisted logistically perhaps by the US and Britain.

Wolf is pushing the administration to declare Darfur a genocide. He said that the administration simply saying it would electrify the world. Wolf said, he read Samantha Power's book, and he doesn't want to wait for her to have to write another book next year about why we didn't do anything about this genocide. He said, the lives of the people of Darfur have every bit as much value as the lives of people in Europe and the US. When he meets the victims of these atrocities, he said he thinks of his own five children and nine grandchildren, and how they wouldn't have anywhere to go. Wolf is truly heroic, he is right, and I commend him.