Obama: Giving cookies to war criminals?

posted at 10:16 pm on September 28, 2009 by Karl
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While the more unhinged elements of the left believe that the Bush administration should have been tried for war crimes, the Obama administration now looks to appease the only country in the world led by a president indicted on war-crimes charges.

That country is Sudan, where Pres. Obama has sent retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration as a special envoy:

While Gration describes the approach as pragmatic and driven by a sense of urgency, his critics here and in the United States say it is dangerously, perhaps willfully, naive. During a recent five-day trip to Sudan, Gration heard from southern officials, displaced Darfurians, rebels and others who complained uniformly that he is being manipulated by government officials who talk peace even as they undermine it.

Still, at the end of the visit, Gration maintained a strikingly different perspective. He had seen signs of goodwill from the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, he said, and viewed many of the complaints as understandable yet knee-jerk reactions to a government he trusts is ready to change.

“We’ve got to think about giving out cookies,” said Gration, who was appointed in March. “Kids, countries, they react to gold stars, smiley faces, handshakes, agreements, talk, engagement.”

As Michael Goldfarb notes:

This from the man who took it upon himself to declare the genocide in Darfur over — mere “remnants of genocide” remain he told reporters in June — at a time when even our push-over Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, was still accusing the Sudanese regime of that precise crime.

Goldfarb goes on to note that the Obama administration’s flip-flop is of a piece with their general foreign policy of sucking up to dictators and authoritarian regimes over a chorus or ten of “Kumbaya.”

Gration is the personification of this larger policy. He was called the “most mystical believer in Obamaism” in The New Yorker and accused of worshipping Obama by Newsweek — which is not unlike two pots calling the kettle a black hole from which light cannot escape. Before getting scotched from consideration for the top job at NASA, Gration was primarily known for sharing Obama’s pipe dream of worldwide nuclear disarmament — a position that seems even more laughable today than it was last year. Gration compares Sudan to a child while displaying the diplomatic skills and realpolitik of a third-grader.

Although a few human rights activists are critical of Gration and Obama for their Darfur flip-flop, the establishment media that was so keen to bash Bush on the issue (despite his pressuring the government to reach a peace deal with southern rebels in 2005) has predictably gone AWOL.

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