Aaron MacLean
The Editor’s Blog
The Washington Free Beacon
11/18/2014
…American policy towards South Sudan is a disaster—such that there is a policy at all. When decisions come, they come—as is the case in most conflicts where American diplomats and soldiers are involved today—from the very top, with policy micromanaged from the offices of Susan Rice and Samantha Power. In terms of meaningful action, the policy has involved the levying of travel and financial sanctions on mid-level commanders and suspected human rights abusers, who must have been devastated when word arrived at their swamp redoubts beside the upper Nile that they are no longer permitted to trade on the New York Stock Exchange.
In addition to sanctions, much hope has been invested in the ability of a regional coalition of neighboring states, organized as the Intergovernmental Authority on Development—IGAD, inauspiciously pronounced as Egad!—to broker a deal between the Dinka and the Nuer, the two tribal networks doing the fighting. IGAD includes among its members Uganda, which has troops in South Sudan backing the government-aligned Dinka, and Sudan, which is widely believed to be backing the rebel Nuers in an effort to act as a spoiler in its recently surrendered territory.
In other words, IGAD not only has no chance of stopping the war—it’s even far from clear that its members want the war to come to a negotiated end. But this doesn’t stop the United Nations, and our ambassador in Turtle Bay, Samantha Power, from speaking of IGAD as though it were some meaningful mechanism for achieving peace…
…A foreign policy premised on the appeal to the better angels of the world’s nature will be forever mugged by the reality that there are no angels available for the appeal.
The complete article, with video, is at The Washington Free Beacon.
