Khartoum Accommodated: US "Lowers the Bar" for Regime's Génocidaires

By: Eric Reeves

During a recent interview on PBS’s “NewsHour” (February 16, 2007), US special envoy for Sudan Andrew Natsios gave clear evidence of a Bush administration strategy to back away from meaningful efforts to pressure Khartoum over its continuing responsibility for genocidal destruction throughout Darfur and eastern Chad. In essence, the US effort is to “lower the bar” for Khartoum in complying with international “demands”---indeed, to lower the bar so far that short of all-out assaults on the displaced person camps, the regime will be judged to be performing acceptably. Such a strategy of course obviates the need to deploy the conspicuously vacuous “Plan B” Natsios threatened in late 2006 if Khartoum did not comply with various “demands” by January 1, 2007. This deadline has come and gone, and as The Washington Post has made clear (February 7, 2007), “Plan B” has so far entailed positioning four US Army colonels on the Chad/Darfur border and a threat to inconvenience Khartoum by obliging conversion of its various commercial enterprises (including oil exports) from dollar-denominated to Euro-denominated contracts. “Plan B” is a bluff, but one that won’t be revealed as such if never deployed.

Other elements of “Plan B” remain classified, according to Natsios during recent Congressional testimony. But Natsios’ implicit characterization of these classified elements of “Plan B” as military in nature is hardly supported by recent Congressional testimony from senior Pentagon officials:

“Senior US defense officials say they are not planning any military intervention to end the killing and suffering in Sudan’s Darfur region. Read more >>>