Miami Student

Issue date: 9/18/07 Section: OpEd Page

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), a frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, takes a bizarre and contradictory approach to the separate issues of Darfur and Iraq. In a July interview with The Associated Press, Obama said the rise of potential genocide between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq was not a sound enough reason to keep troops in Iraq. His backwards answer to such a scenario is that the U.S. should then be stationing troops in Darfur. But that policy significantly resembles what Obama desires-Western military "advisers" under the guise of a UN peacekeeping force invading a sovereign country to bring peace and stability. It sounds as if Obama is plagiarizing paragraphs of the Bush Doctrine-only applying it to the part of the globe his supporters are recently
concerned with.

Sudan has made it clear that their government would view any UN peacekeeping force in Darfur as an invading force. Resolution 1706 passed the UN General Assembly Aug. 31, 2006 but the Sudanese refused to allow a UN peacekeeping force enter the country. Obama's and others' calls for increased support for a UN peacekeeping appear fruitless when Sudan would never permit such a force to enter Darfur. The U.S. is in a unique military situation to prevent genocide in Iraq and calls for withdrawal there only to prevent genocide elsewhere would hurt the United States' credibility in the Middle East far more than whatever George W. Bush has done as President. Perhaps U.S. military involvement in Darfur will ultimately prove necessary, but such a move would only strengthen the argument of maintaining a strong military presence in Iraq as well.

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