Posted By James Besser
More on Sudan: Be Wary of War Option / Rabbi Steve Gutow
(Editors Note: recently Shoshana Bryen, special projects director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, wrote a Machers Blog item chastising Jewish groups involved in the fight to end the genocide in Darfur for their unwillingness to consider military solutions to the problem.
Here is a response from Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs – and the board chair of the Save Darfur Coalition.)
Goodness, Shoshana's simple answer seems so easy. Why not walk in with troops and teach those animals in Khartoum once and for all that we mean business and that their genocide must stop? The United States could do that. Our power is great. Thursday, I took a taxi to Reagan in DC and listened to a cab driver from Sierra Leone attack a "bullying" United States in a way so venomous that I had to shout back just to maintain my conscience.
I hate the policies of the Khartoum regime, hate them enough to fill up my days as co-chair of the interfaith, intergroup Save Darfur Coalition---no rest for the weary, particularly when Sudan’s devastation of Darfur is the main genocide in town. I have toyed with, challenged the State Department with, and tried to ingest the idea of unilateral war as the answer. It is not.
There is a world of worries and they are not minor ones. At the outset, I enter this debate as one who believes that 'war is hell' not to be entered into lightly without a moral and just reason, without a winning plan, and without an easy to understand and embrace endgame.
Sudan-- even though it would be difficult to deny that the main perpetrator is al-Bashir, there are many unclean hands among the tribes of Darfur. That does not obviate the idea of military action but it makes it less simple. We are doing this to take power from one tyrant and give it to_____? Or are we assuming that we will just maintain the place ourselves? Not often a good plan!
Add the DC taxi-driver factor into the mix--much of the world sees us as bullies who cannot keep our greedy hands to ourselves. Iraq is not seen by third worlders, second worlders, or allied first worlders as a moment of American idealism. Our standing, our ability to lead is at a nadir and we have some major challenges ahead.
If we walk in to Sudan as bulls in china shops, will we merely infuse the Arab and Moslem world with a sense of deja-vu; of we need to stop the 'great Satan'; of let's rally around he flag of Allah and stop these evil monsters before they eat us. If we do this little 'let's have a fight on the playground' scene, will Europe just sit back and say, 'There they go again' and lessen its already tenuous connections to a nation they used to see as an ally. Is there an end-game? G-d knows that whatever endgame we imagined in Iraq when the warriors decided that we should engage there has taken us into an unintended and seemingly endless purgatory.
I do not want 'war' off the table. I want to think about the efficacy of war, unilaterally and more optimistically, in coalition. If not war, there may well be other strong avenues of force such as no-fly zones and strategies to stop flows of arms to Sudan but to suggest that there are no more peaceful avenues to resolution may sound good in some corners but they do not hold water in the real world.
Looking at the recent success in North Korea might give the libido for armed conflict a little pause; most recognize the power of sanctions and political pressure in stopping apartheid in South Africa. Moreover, the horrific slaughters in South Sudan by this same Khartoum regime were stopped by economic and political pressure just a few short years ago.
Those of us who want to stop the slaughter will continue to do all the things that Shoshana seemed to dismiss. We will hang banners, support divestment, urge the country and the world to take stronger and stronger economic and political action. We will try and pressure China to exert more pressure and we will use the Olympics to help increase such pressure. When we say 'war', we are walking in a very dangerous minefield.
Perhaps, we should go in that direction but not flippantly and without the kind of full analysis and thought that should precede any such action. War is Hell for sure and we best be very, very wary of hell.