Editorials: Collateral damage
dangerous policy been set? Scott Horton, former chairman of the Committee on International Human Rights of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, was approached last year by a...
...Rumsfeld has lowered the bar...
...The pictures of American soldiers abusing and humiliating Iraqi prisoners have done enormous damage...
...Commonweal 6 June 4, 2004...
...Yet, despite universal acknowledgment of the catastrophe the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse represents, no high-ranking administration official or military officer has tendered his resignation...
...That's a lot of people...
...For decades, an unrelenting civil war has raged there between the Muslim-dominated north and the black animists and Christians in the south...
...May 25, 2004 COLLATERAL DAMAGE Sudan is Africa's largest country, greater in size than Texas and Alaska combined...
...In the last year alone, more than a million people have fled their villages, and another hundred thousand have streamed across the border to Chad, one of Africa's poorest but most hospitable countries...
...Legislation has been introduced in both houses of Congress condemning Khartoum's policy in Darfur, and President George W. Bush has called for an international response...
...Responding to demands for greater autonomy from the black Muslim majority in that region, the government instigated and enabled Arab marauders to sweep in and pillage, rape, and kill their black co-religionists...
...Whatever hopes there might have been that the Arab and Muslim world would take the stated reasons for the war against Iraq at face value have disappeared...
...She told interviewer David Brancaccio that as many as four hundred thousand refugees "will be dead by December if they are not reached and rescued...
...Some prominent supporters of the administration have called on Rumsfeld and other highly placed architects of the war to resign...
...As reported by Slate, the military lawyers told Horton that when they approached Douglas Feith, the third highest-ranking civilian in the Defense Department, with their concerns, he was unmoved...
...Even there, the Khartoum government has pursued and attacked the refugees...
...Following numerous broken cease-fires, the government and the s6uthern rebels—neither group model citizens—have at last almost reached an agreement for a six-year truce...
...But just when some respite from the bloodletting seemed possible, another disaster broke out, this one in the western Darfur region, an area the size of France...
...For an administration that likes to stress the importance of individual responsibility, this failure to hold people accountable can only further erode public confidence in the president's judgment and in the conduct of the war...
...The task of winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis has become immeasurably harder, and the president's new public-relations campaign seeking to emphasize Iraq's "future" rather than the recent past, is unlikely to alter the situation on the ground...
...Unfortunately, the president's other foreignpolicy initiatives, specifically in Iraq, have so weakened U.S...
...Many, like Rumsfeld and the generals in charge of the prisons, have said they "accept full responsibility," but what accepting responsibility entails remains a mystery...
...credibility and limited the number of troops Washington has to offer—none—that no other country has yet responded...
...Mukesh Kapila, UN coordinator for Sudan, told the Economist (May 15) that the situation constitutes "the worst humanitarian crisis in the world...
...It is remarkable—and remarkably alarming—that the American people cannot expect the same sense of accountability from their government...
...Estimates say that more than 2 million people have died and twice as many have been displaced—most to border countries, but some as far away as to the United States...
...It is worth remembering how conservative supporters of the president and his policies exulted last year when a New York Times reporter was found to have plagiarized and invented a series of news stories...
...Despite the debacle in Iraq, the American people and their representatives must, in concert with other nations, act to end ethnic cleansing in Darfur...
...In recent years, the discovery of significant oil deposits in the south, coupled with the imposition of strict Islamic law by the government in Khartoum, has fed the ongoing conflagration...
...Samantha Power, an expert on wars of ethnic cleansing, spelled out the near-term consequences during an interview on PBS's Now (May 7...
...We're giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions...
...Ten years after Rwanda, we must not remain silent on events in Sudan...
...Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has had similar conversations with outraged members of the military, who know that the failure to abide by international law in treating prisoners endangers Americans, especially American soldiers...
...She was speaking just after the tenth-anniversary observance of the genocide in Rwanda...
...Some JAGs hate this and are horrified thatthe tolerance of mistreatment will come back and haunt us in the next war," he told the New Yorker...
...Scott Horton, former chairman of the Committee on International Human Rights of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, was approached last year by a group of military Judge Advocate General lawyers (JAGs) who were concerned about the administration's attitude toward the Geneva Conventions...
...Those in charge of the Times newsroom, recognizing that only new leadership could restore the paper's credibility, resigned...
...They said [Feith] had a dismissive, if not derisive, attitude toward the Geneva Conventions," Horton said...
...Nor has President Bush fired anyone or demanded any resignations...
...I mean," " she emphasized, "that's half the Rwanda tally...
...According to Power, "the Bush administration is the only...country at the UN that has drawn attention to this suffering...
...In effect, said Power, "the United States has so undermined its standing in the world that it actually has proven itself incapable of speaking up on behalf of principle in other areas...
Vol. 131 • June 2004 • No. 11
