The US’s Pelosi Doctrine on Darfur

Editorial, The Wall Street Journal

April 14, 2006 — The killing in Darfur province of Sudan is terrible, but as a foreign policy problem it is also instructive. In particular, it is exposing the weakness of a strand of U.S. foreign policy thinking that might be called the Pelosi Doctrine, after House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Darfur is the Sudanese province where Arab Janjaweed militia supported by the Khartoum government have murdered an estimated 200,000 mostly black Muslims and displaced another two million. President Bush has requested $439 million in humanitarian aid, proposed a NATO mission to the area (an idea our European allies instantly shot down) and is now pushing for a U.N. peacekeeping contingent to replace the ineffectual forces of the African Union, as well as targeted U.N. sanctions against Sudan’s leadership.

As an alternative, consider Ms. Pelosi’s position. She has made Darfur a personal priority, demanding action and, to her credit, joining a recent Congressional delegation to Darfur and Khartoum to meet with Vice President Ali Taha, who denied there was anything much amiss. Ms. Pelosi described her experiences with obvious sincerity from the House floor last week. Then she offered this: The Administration must appoint a special envoy to Sudan as a way of “[signaling] that bringing peace and stability to Sudan is a priority of the United States.”

Now, why hadn’t anyone else thought of that? We’ll grant that a forceful envoy might orchestrate a more effective and coherent response to the Sudanese atrocities. Similar efforts by Jay Lefkowitz, Mr. Bush’s special envoy for North Korea, have at least had the useful effect of devising ways to help trapped and abused North Korean refugees in northeastern China escape to free countries.

Then again, the record of most other “special envoys” has not been promising. Cyrus Vance, David Owen, Peter Carrington and countless other worthies trooped through Belgrade in the early ’90s, trying to make Slobodan Milosevic “see reason” as Serbian troops massacred civilians in Vukovar, Sarajevo and Srebrenica. Milosevic rightly interpreted this brand of diplomacy-by-signals as evidence the West lacked the political will to stop the killing, which would have meant stopping him.

Yet this is exactly what Ms. Pelosi now proposes to do with Khartoum. The job of the special envoy, she says, is to find ways to “stop the violence, bring the people to the negotiating table and get humanitarian relief to the people who need it.” These are contradictory goals. Bringing “people” to the table means giving Sudan’s government — the perpetrator of the genocide — a seat and thus a veto over how and when the Darfur crisis is resolved. It is Khartoum that is the chief obstacle to deploying U.N. troops in the region.

This is of a piece for what passes as a security policy in most of Ms. Pelosi’s party. A recently published Democratic “plan” for “real security” offers some poll-tested words on “finishing the job in Afghanistan,” spending more on body armor and veterans’ benefits, getting out of Iraq fast and achieving energy independence by 2020. The word “democracy” is never mentioned, nor is the word “prevention.” On outrages such as the one in Darfur, the plan promises to “lead international efforts to uphold and defend human rights; and renew long-standing alliances that have advanced our national security objectives.”

Terrific. In Sudan, that and the United Nations will get you exactly . . . what we have now: slaughter. With the best of intentions, Ms. Pelosi urges Mr. Bush to “do something” about Darfur. But she then refuses to confront the fact that the very international institutions and sometime allies she wants the U.S. to defer to are unable or unwilling to help Mr. Bush do anything at all.

Her “special envoy” is a substitute for the kind of action that might actually make a difference. In the short term, that would mean arming the Darfuris so they can defend themselves. In the long term, it means regime change in Khartoum — which would almost certainly require the use of U.S. military force.

Mr. Bush’s reluctance to commit U.S. troops in Sudan is understandable given our current battles in Iraq and Afghanistan and our obligations around the world. But if Ms. Pelosi’s outrage over Sudan is more than posturing, she’d focus less on the White House and more on the fecklessness and obstruction of the countries and United Nations that she typically invests with so much moral authority.