Crisis in Darfur and crisis in America

By Matthew Meyerhofer

Activities by the new club Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) have at least momentarily brought the ongoing crisis in Darfur back into the Santa Clara consciousness.

Furthermore, STAND claims to be bringing at least 100 Santa Clara students to a rally in San Francisco on April 30 to help raise awareness of the genocide occurring in the Sudan.

These students are to be commended for their efforts. But at the same time, we must ask the question, "What are we rallying behind?"

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have complicated our nation's attitude toward humanitarian intervention. Granted, both wars were initially premised on national security interests (preventing terrorism and the use of weapons of mass destruction), but they each took on a humanitarian flavor very quickly.

From Afghanistan we heard stories of gender suppression of the worst kind and of brutally rigid religious control. In Iraq, a great deal was made of Saddam Hussein's ruthless dictatorial regime. In each case, ostensibly at least, we justified our presence using humanitarian principles.

And yet, the legitimacy of these principles have been eroded by both the right and the left. Liberals contend that both invasions and occupations were morally illegitimate and miserably unsuccessful. Meanwhile, the conservatives directing the occupation have insisted upon what amounts to a unilateral strategy, a position that undermines the universal principles of humanitarianism.

And so again I ask, "What are we rallying behind?" It doesn't seem to be another military intervention. Military interventionism is suffering from a stigma of similar type (if not magnitude) that followed the Vietnam War. Skepticism of the possibility of genuine humanitarian intervention runs rampant as analysts make their cases for "It's all about oil," "It's all about Saudi money" and "It's a clash between civilizations."

Are we rallying behind economic sanctions? The cases of both Cuba and Iraq should provide us with sufficient evidence that this sort of action is much less precise than bombing sorties and much more likely to provoke an epidemic or a famine than real political change. Ruthless dictators generally prove apt at foisting economic burdens on the shoulders of the least fortunate.

Are we really rallying behind humanitarian aid? A worthy endeavor, to be sure, but this is a treatment of the symptoms of the crisis rather than its causes. And without achieving any real stability in the region, the distribution of humanitarian aid is often impossibly difficult. Somalia taught us that.

This is why I believe that the humanitarian crisis in Darfur precipitates an ideological crisis here in the United States. Perhaps it is a crisis that we have been avoiding for some time, a crisis we should have addressed in Rwanda and Kosovo. Or maybe it is something new, since American involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq seems to have especially polarized the United States. But at any rate, it is a crisis we need to solve.

The consequences of leaving the crisis unsolved are both morally and politically hazardous. Anyone who truly believes in spreading democracy to non-democratic countries or who is passionately committed to the ideal of human rights cannot simply be content to sit back and criticize genocide from afar.

But taking the step from recognizing and criticizing an atrocity to working towards its solution presents several significant problems.

First, the attitude of strict non-interventionism, justified by either the "not our problem" or "not our business" doctrines essentially amounts to xenophobia and moral relativism of the worst kind.

If morality is to mean anything at all under any moral theory, then the mass slaughter of innocent persons must be condemned as atrocious.

Correspondingly, if there is such a thing as "moral duty" then the prevention of these acts is the responsibility of those countries that have the capability to make a difference.

So the ideological challenge for those of us in the United States is to rally behind a cause that will make a moral and meaningful difference. No simple catchphrase like "War is never just" or "The global spread of democracy" is adequate to the task.

Instead, we must examine the problem in all its complexity. We must devise a strategy that promises to safeguard and improve the lives of those individuals who do not enjoy the same level of freedom as those theorists who would absolve us of responsibility.

Matthew Meyerhofer is a senior English and philosophy major.