In an unflinching blog post published last month, Will Inboden over at Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government blog tore apart the Obama administration’s new Sudan policy review document.
We don’t agree with all of his criticisms, but one of them is definitely spot-on:
“…[T]he Obama administration seems rather obtuse about the lessons of history, even the recent past. Such as remembering that [Sudan's President] Bashir, besides presiding over the serial murder of his own people, is also a serial violator of negotiated agreements. Or that it was only under the pain of sanctions (and a poignant awareness of American military might in the wake of 9/11) that Khartoum came to the negotiating table with then-Special Envoy John Danforth to eventually end the North-South war and forge the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in early 2005. Or that the Bush administration’s efforts in its latter years to end the Darfur genocide included a series of positive inducements offered to Bashir by numerous presidential envoys — such as upgraded diplomatic relations, removal from the terrorism sponsor list, cessation of sanctions, etc. — that ultimately did not avail in changing Bashir’s behavior.”
The upshot: history proves that the Sudanese government only responds to concerted pressure.
President Obama should remember and should not repeat the previous U.S. administration’s Sudan failures. He should remember that President Bush tried a strategy of laying out a red carpet of incentives for the Sudanese government — a strategy that undeniably failed.
