Redeeming America

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On April 18, President Bush delivered a long-awaited speech on his plan to stem the genocide in Darfur. During three years of international hand-wringing, hundreds of thousands had died and millions had been displaced in waves of violence that showed no signs of abating. The hope was that this speech would be a beginning to the end of the suffering.

No stranger to dramatic symbols, Bush chose to appear at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., during a weeklong observation of Holocaust Remembrance. Several survivors attended, including Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, and Bush addressed them directly: 'You who have survived evil know that the only way to defeat it is to look it in the face and not back down.'

Then came the call to action: 'It is evil we are now seeing in Sudan--and we're not going to back down.'

As Bush began to outline his plan for Darfur, however, what began as a battle cry quickly turned into just another hollow threat. The onetime with-us-or-against-us commander in chief explained that he would give the United Nations more time for diplomacy, even as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's regime was painting its warplanes white--pirating the color of humanitarian relief.

The decision to avoid direct action was a bitter disappointment to those thousands who had worked tirelessly in the grassroots campaign to end the genocide. But more notably, it was reportedly a frustrating disappointment to The Decider himself.

This was a president, after all, who in 2001 famously scrawled 'Not on my watch' in the margins of a report detailing the Clinton administration's failures to prevent the murderous mania that claimed 800,000 innocents in Rwanda; the first American president to use the word genocide to define an ongoing mass slaughter; and who, despite all his global blundering and plundering, had marshaled the necessary diplomatic resources to forge a fragile but meaningful peace in the bloody 21-year civil war between Sudan's north and south. This was, in short, a leader who wanted to stop the killing in Darfur.

But he couldn't. And his impotence was revealing.

Bush's inability to effect change was not due to a lack of political will or to indifference. It was a failure of power. The power to pose a credible military threat in the midst of a quagmire in Iraq. The power to sway the U.N. Security Council, stalled by China, to act. And, most critically, the power to move the world's conscience--a glaring example of America's fallen standing in the world.

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