Keepin’ it real

George Packer had a leader in last week’s issue of the New Yorker, which is no longer online, lamenting how US foreign policy is now firmly headed down the realist foreign policy path. Discussing the influence of decidedly non-Neo Cons Robert Gates and James Baker III on White House foreign policy decisions going forward, Packer writes:

These are the same men who, fifteen years ago, abandoned Afghanistan to civil war and Al Qaeda, allowed Saddam to massacre his own people and concluded that genocide in the Balkans was none of America’s business. They are not the guardians of all wisdom. At some point, events will remind Americans that currently discredited concepts such as humanitarian intervention and nation-building have a lot to do with national security—that they originated as necessary evils to prevent greater evils. But, for now, Kissinger is king.

In other words, to quote Dr. Phil, the entire US political establishment has decided its “time to get real,” with the possible exception of John McCain who is suggesting we send more troops in. (Though, as Frank Rich pointed out, he probably knows this isn’t going to happen.)

The rest of the GOP, despite their lip service, have long since abandoned their short-lived flirtation with neo-conservatism and are going back to the position President Bush espoused in the 2000 primaries. One prominent right-winger pundit proclaimed, essentially, Iraq is the Democrats problem now. And the Dems, who won the election based on some vague notion of leaving ASAP, have found a newfound respect for the Scowcroft set.

This is the other casualty of the Bush Administration’s Iraq plan: The ability for the US to confidently work with other nations to solve increasingly global problems the world over: the natural resource issues Jonn has written about, strife in Africa and Palestine. The politicized push into Iraq discredited it, while the ongoing fallout from the war made sure people won’t support it again anytime in the immediate future.

It’s a shame. These “discredited concepts” could help in a place like Darfur, where 500,000 lives have been lost so far in the Second Sudanese Civil War. This week I stumbled onto the website of two filmmakers, Jason Mojica and Jim Malik, who are currently raising money to travel to Darfur next month and make a movie called Christmas in Darfur.

It’s the sort of gutsy reporting project we here at AR like, but the filmmakers admit they have an uphill battle. For one, intervention in Darfur isn’t the sort of thing that captures the imagination of the well-heeled, “war-weary” youth of the West. And forget sullen young people when the filmmakers note you can't even get through to the politicians. The filmmakers write in their web site:

[G]overnments have realized that there is absolutely zero percentage for them in stepping in to try to stop the bloodshed. They catch hell domestically ("No Blood for Oil!”, “Wag the Dog!”) or get pictures of the corpses of 19-year-old kids getting dragged through the street . . . . What this means is that the marginal value of each life has effectively dropped to zero. Kill 5 people, kill 500, kill 500,000 - it makes no difference - each added fatality has absolutely no policy impact and won’t change the situation one iota

With Kissinger Associates in charge of our current foreign policy and the Democrats racking up all manner of political points going along for the ride, Darfur isn’t going to be on the US foreign policy agenda anytime soon. But should that stop anything?