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The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg reports the depressing news that the Bush administration is rapidly backtracking from action to stop the genocide in Darfur, and is recently making nice with the Sudanese government. Goldberg writes that on a trip last week to Darfur, Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick vastly lowballed the death count there and refused to call what is occurring in Darfur genocide, as former Secretary of State Colin Powell had already declared it. Africa watchers and human rights activists say Zoellick's equivocating was a very deliberate signal:
This is quite depressing news. Perhaps the Bush administration's increasing posture of a relationship of political expedience with the Sudan regime is best explained by Ken Silverstein's blockbuster piece from Khartoum today in the Los Angeles Times. The two pieces read together are quite illuminating that while the Bush administration talks a good game about Sharansky and human rights, their recent actions with the Saudis and Khartoum speak volumes about their preference for political expedience most every time. As Atrios often says, "LIARS!""Zoellick is not some State Department official acting on his own,” [the International Crisis Group's John] Prendergast told me, “but was deliberately signaling a shift in administration policy." Eric Reeves, the Smith College professor whose analysis of the conflict continues to prove prescient, agrees. Shortly after the press conference, Reeves surmised on his Web site that Zoellick’s comments heralded a new administration strategy meant to forestall the need for a U.S. commitment to humanitarian intervention by downplaying the urgency of the situation.
If so, this post-Powell policy is placing the administration on a collision course with Congress. Last week, the Senate unanimously passed the Darfur Accountability Act as part of the Iraq-Afghanistan emergency supplemental appropriations bill. Led by Republican Sam Brownback of Kansas and Democrat John Corzine of New Jersey, the act appropriates $90 million in U.S. aid for Darfur and establishes targeted U.S. sanctions against the Sudanese regime, accelerates assistance to expand the size and mandate of the African Union mission in Darfur, expands the United Nations Mission in Sudan to include the protection of civilians in Darfur, establishes a no-fly zone over Darfur, and calls for a presidential envoy to Sudan...
Yet in an April 25 letter from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget to House Appropriations Chairman Jerry Lewis obtained by the Prospect, the administration signaled its desire to strike the Darfur Accountability Act from the supplemental.
Rice is a far more disappointing Secretary of State than some of us could have imagined, and Bolton's appeasing of genocide has been well established. The Bush administration is being ill served by the team Bush has chosen to advise him on humanitarian matters.
Update: More on the revelations in the Silverstein piece about the Bush-Khartoum intelligence relationship from Tapped's Goldberg.
Sunday Update: Nadezhda of Liberals Against Terrorism has a different take: the African Union has agreed to double their force strength in Darfur, one sign of what she says more generally is evidence the Africans are "getting their act together."