NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF: Mr. Bush, Here’s a Plan for Darfur

[kevinmc]

Frustrated by the genocide he is tolerating in Darfur, President Bush has suggested to aides on occasion that maybe the U.S. should just send troops there.

He alluded to that when he told a woman in Tennessee who asked him about Darfur: “The threshold question was: If there is a problem, why don’t you just go take care of it?” Mr. Bush was talked out of the idea by Condi Rice, who told him that the U.S. just couldn’t start another war in a Muslim country. So, as Mr. Bush told the questioner: “I made the decision not to send U.S. troops unilaterally into Darfur.”

That was the right decision. The Sudanese regime would use our invasion as a rallying cry against infidels and make the crisis harder to resolve.

But the upshot was that Mr. Bush, lacking a military option, hasn’t taken up other options. He seems genuinely appalled by the horrors of Darfur — he raises them regularly with foreign leaders, even when aides haven’t put them on his talking points — yet he has done little, apparently because he doesn’t know quite what to do. So here are some practical suggestions.

First, the administration should invest far more energy toward seeking a negotiated peace between rebels and government — the only long-term solution to the slaughter. Instead, the diplomatic focus has been on U.N. peacekeepers, and they are a terrific addition but not a solution in themselves.........

http://freedemocracy.blogspot.com/2007/08/nicholas-d-kristof-mr-bush-heres-plan.html