How to Save Darfur

By Peter Beinart

Genocide comes at inconvenient times. In 1994, the Clinton Administration was reeling from Somalia--a country it had fled after the deaths of 18 U.S. troops. So America watched as Rwanda's genocidaires murdered nearly 1 million people in 100 days. And then everyone began feeling bad. Bill Clinton flew to Rwanda to apologize. After reading an article about the genocide, George W. Bush reportedly scribbled, "Not on my watch!"

In hindsight, stopping genocide is easy. But in Darfur, where it is happening now, stopping genocide is brutally hard. A contingent of 7,000 African Union peacekeepers currently patrol the Texas-size chunk of western Sudan where government-backed militias are busy exterminating the non-Arab population. The African soldiers are decent and brave, but they are engaged in a sham. The militias menace villagers in front of the peacekeepers' eyes; Sudan's government steals the fuel they need to fly their planes. In the words of U.N. envoy Jan Pronk, "The people on the ground are just laughing."

In spite of a Security Council resolution approving a larger, tougher U.N. peacekeeping force, the government of Sudan refuses to allow Blue Helmets on its soil. When the Bush Administration sent its Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs to Sudan's capital, Khartoum, to persuade President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to admit the U.N. force, it was two days before he would even meet with her. Al-Bashir has a rather different plan for solving the problem: just before the Security Council vote, he launched a military offensive aimed at cleansing Darfur once and for all. The U.N. is warning of "a man-made catastrophe of an unprecedented scale."

There's only one way to save Darfur: tell Sudan it can either accept the U.N. force or face war against the world's most powerful military alliance. Though the U.N. can't fight its way into Darfur, NATO can. If it does, al-Bashir could end up following Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic and Liberia's Charles Taylor to a war-crimes trial at the Hague. Confronted with that prospect, al-Bashir might conclude that a U.N. peacekeeping force isn't so bad.

Unfortunately, genocidal dictators are generally not impressed by tough talk. Milosevic didn't abandon Bosnia until NATO bombed him for two weeks. He didn't abandon Kosovo until NATO began planning a ground invasion. No one knows al-Bashir's breaking point. To find it, NATO must first impose a no-fly zone over Darfur so Sudanese MiGs can't keep assisting Arab militias from the air. That's doable. A congressional expert estimates that it would require 12 to 18 fighter jets, probably French and American, based in neighboring Chad. If shooting down a few Sudanese planes (and thus eliminating much of the Sudanese air force) didn't make al-Bashir relent, NATO would probably have to bomb Khartoum. And while doing so, it would have to begin preparations for a ground invasion.

The very idea makes Western leaders break out in a cold sweat. Once again, genocide is coming at an inconvenient time. The U.S. military is buckling under the strain of Iraq. NATO has all it can handle in Afghanistan. Barely anyone wants the U.S. and its allies to attack another Muslim country--except for the black Muslims of Darfur, thousands of whom were seen this summer chanting "Welcome, welcome, U.S.A."

Yet a ground operation in Darfur is well within NATO's capacity. The newly created 25,000-member NATO Response Force, which reaches operational capacity this October, is made for situations like this. It can deploy in five days, fight its way into a hostile area, and stay for a month before needing to be resupplied. That would be long enough to decimate Darfur's militias and secure its refugee camps before handing the job over to U.N. peacekeepers.

So far, only the boldest politicians will even whisper about such things. It's easy to see why. NATO intervention would be aimed at saving Muslim lives, but that wouldn't stop al-Qaeda from screaming about the West's recolonization of the Islamic world. Bringing stability to a region as complicated and brutalized as Darfur could take years, if not decades. U.N. peacekeepers still patrol Kosovo today, and that's an easier case.

You could fill volumes detailing the geopolitical reasons America should abandon Darfur to its fate. The argument for military action, by contrast, rests on just two tarnished words. Last week a small crowd gathered in Kigali, Rwanda. "If you don't protect the people of Darfur today," said a man named Freddy Umutanguha, "never again will we believe you when you visit Rwanda's mass graves, look us in the eye and say 'Never again.'" Try offering a geopolitical answer to that.