The Bush Administration And Darfur: Appeasement Driven By Oil

[RestoreGore]

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article15172.htm

Oil Enters the Picture

Exactly how much oil lay beneath the dusty red savannas of Darfur was unclear, at least to the outside world, back when the Bush administration took office. (If Khartoum had commissioned preliminary geologic surveys, it wasn't telling.) Darfur is three-quarters the size of Texas, and the violence there had left large swaths of the country inaccessible to geologists. By early 2005, however, the destruction of villages and the clearing of inhabitants from the land had opened the way for oil exploration.

Until April 2005, it was said that whatever oil deposits existed in Darfur were confined to its southeastern corner. However, new seismographic studies brought a surprise. On April 19, 2005, Mohamed Siddig, a spokesman for the Sudan Energy Ministry, announced that a new high-yield well had been drilled in North Darfur -- several hundred kilometers northwest of the existing fields. Seismographic studies indicated that a huge basin of oil, expected to yield up to 500,000 barrels of crude per day, lay in the area. This Darfur discovery effectively doubled Sudan's oil reserves.

Perhaps as astonishing as the oil discovery, reported in brief by Reuters, was that it was not picked up by the world press. You are probably learning about the discovery for the first time here at Tomdispatch. Yet it may explain in part Mr. Bush's puzzling retreat on Darfur. The Bush administration had already been developing a closer relationship with Khartoum, based (it was claimed) on the sharing of intelligence about potential operations in the President's Global War on Terror. The announcement of the new find in April 2005 seemed to accelerate these efforts, and may explain why, a month later, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a jet to Khartoum to ferry Sudan's chief of intelligence, Major General Salah Abdallah Gosh, to a clandestine meeting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

This provoked a political tempest when the Los Angeles Times revealed the meeting (as well as a split within the State Department between those who thought Gosh should be arrested as a war criminal and others who toed the administration line). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had the unenviable task of explaining that our government sought "closer ties" with a terrorist regime because of its cooperation in the "war on terrorism." Khartoum voiced hopes that U.S. sanctions would soon be lifted.

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Seems Bush is too cowardly to face the real "Islamo-fascists" he talks about, especially when oil is in the picture... even at the expense of millions of innocent lives. There are no words to express the depth of my disgust.

[RestoreGore]

1. I suppose Darfur isn't important either

Not compared to a sex scandal near an election.