Despite almost 1.5 million bombing sorties flown against Germany during the Second World War, the United States and Britain failed for lack of trying to destroy the system of transport that fed the gas chambers and crematoria. Thirty-five years later, America did not, despite its unquestioned naval supremacy, protect the Vietnamese boat people. That we and our two allies capable of projecting power, France and Britain, are now distracted and divided by the wars in the Middle East is terribly unfortunate for the people of Darfur.
The genocide there is thus an unattended stepchild left to well-meaning groups and individuals who further sap the possibility of decisive action by directing attention to delicate measures of relief and equally fragile diplomacy. Blankets are necessary, but they will not stop the razing of villages. As Sudan brazenly defies, if not the world’s will, then, its wishes, and the death toll closes upon half a million, the pity is that the people of Darfur can in fact be saved. In concert with our allies or entirely alone, we have the military potential to accomplish this.
The multinational troops in Darfur have neither the training nor the mobility to defend the population adequately. Seventy-eight countries, each with its own rules of engagement, are represented in what is less a rescue mission than a camping trip to the Tower of Babel. A possibly influential force is developing in Chad, where the European Union, soon to be supplemented by Russian helicopters, will deploy weakly to defend a line drawn across largely empty desert. But why not cross that line? Violating sovereignty is a matter of immense consequence and gravity. Then again, so is genocide.
Although Darfur is part of Sudan, it is physically distant from the country’s heartland and sources of military power. Every inch of the 600 miles of barren territory between Khartoum and the killing grounds is an opportunity for a reprieve commanded by American air power — with not a boot on the ground. The Sudanese military in Darfur can be trapped there without sustenance, to wither or retreat as the bulk of Sudanese forces are kept out. And the janjaweed can be denied tangible support merely by severing the few extenuated routes of supply.
The first requirement of a cordon sanitaire, however, would be to cut all air links, which would require carrier-based air strikes to destroy the Sudanese air force’s 51 combat aircraft, 25 transports, and 44 helicopters (all figures from the International Institute for Strategic Studies); its fuel, munitions and maintenance facilities; and the few runways capable of supporting heavy transports and fighters. Were Chad to approve a small expeditionary force of America’s A-10 tactical-air-support planes, which it probably would, just a few of these could closely suppress remnant Sudanese armor and check any force of the janjaweed militia sufficiently concentrated to overcome local means of self-defense.
Moreover, none of this would prove necessary were the United States willing to go further and threaten or accomplish the destruction of the Sudanese regime’s means to power over a country that has been pulled apart centrifugally by multiple secessions. One needn’t be squeamish about such a proposition. It pertains to a government that has long massacred hundreds of thousands of its “own” people in its South and West, supported international terrorism and menaced most of its neighbors.
The precise targeting of a substantial portion of its 1,200 armored vehicles and 1,100 artillery pieces; its telecommunications exchanges and microwave towers; its dozen small naval vessels; its aircraft, runways, munitions, military headquarters, logistical stores, security ministries and presidential residences would be only a few days’ work for long-range bombers dispatched from remote bases, and the planes of two carrier task forces hastened to the Red Sea.
Which would the regime in Sudan prefer? To be annihilated, or to discontinue its campaign of mass murder in Darfur? Given Sudan’s record, very few nations would be willing to come to its aid with other than a pro forma whimper, and given the geography and the air and naval balance, no nation could. Though many a repressive dictatorship would protest, and Sudan’s patron, China, might determine to speed up the formation of the blue-water navy it is already building, little else would change except for the better.
This is especially so because only in the worst case would a military strike actually be necessary. One of the chief attractions of such an initiative is that, if properly directed, it could, one way or another, military strike or not, accomplish its aims. These are, first, to stop the mass killings and dislocations; and, second, to pressure Sudan into negotiating settlements in good faith (which it need not do as long as it retains its habitual option of simply murdering the populations it finds troublesome).
The threat itself would likely be enough. If not, then to carry it out in the present circumstances would be honorable, right and overdue. For these are human lives that in Darfur are senselessly extinguished. There is no soul anywhere more valuable than any of theirs, no child more worth saving than any of theirs. We are able to do so, as we can stand our carriers and pilots at the ready. And why would we not? A whole people, no matter how wretched or obscure, must certainly be worth three days of ammunition.
Mark Helprin, a fellow at the Claremont Institute and the author of, among other books, A Soldier of the Great War.