On The Road: Self Indulgence Alert

I am hitting the road for the next ten days or so. This weekend I'll be attending the 123rd annual meeting of the American Historical Association in New York, where I hope to see this for the first time. Then I will be heading to Washington, DC, to participate in the 2009 Jack and Anita Hess Seminar for Faculty (pdf) at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. (My own perspective and connection is the issue of genocide in Africa, an issue about which I have written a little and taught a bit more.) As always, I'll post as I can.

Confronting Genocide in the Future

In the wake of the Iraq conflict gone wrong, one of my biggest worries is that the very idea of the use of force will forever be tainted in the minds of some people. Nonetheless the world in which we live guarantees us that there will always be bad guys, some of whom will only respond to force. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institute has a proposal at TNR online. With an eye toward Darfur, O'Hanlon argues for the establishment of "a U.S. military division dedicated solely to the prevention of genocide."
he identifies the problem as follows:

Even if you sent a million soldiers to Darfur, that would not solve the problem," a Sudanese minister recently taunted Western governments. The West could probably prove him wrong with a mere 20,000 troops, but, unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. It has now been four months since the United Nations authorized the deployment of peacekeepers to Darfur to stop the killing and destruction that has so far claimed 400,000 lives. During that time, the genocide has, by most accounts, accelerated. But the United Nations will not send peacekeepers to the region without Sudan's approval, and Sudan's genocidal leaders--eager to see the carnage continue--refuse to give their approval, so the U.N. force hasn't deployed. And it probably never will.

I would like to see such a policy enacted, but with the understanding that the US genocide peace force always try to work with allies on the ground -- say, the African Union in the case of troubles on that continent. Another key would be for such a force not to be fungible -- that is, the mandate would have to be clear that such troops could not be pulled into other conflicts. The creation of such a division might not be viable now, but perhaps in the future it will happen, when we are shaking our heads and saying "Never again" yet again.