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The Hollywood Actor's Burden
Why are those, like George Clooney, who opposed Bush's war in Iraq now calling on the president to 'Save Darfur'?

...Some of the same journalists who wrote scathing reports about America's impact on Iraq are now in Darfur asking when the 'international community' will come to help a beleaguered people, and presenting the conflict there in simplistic, almost child-like terms as a battle of good and evil in which we must assist the good guys. Yet, as any reading of African history (presumably not Clooney's strong suit) would reveal, such interventions to 'save Africa' always end up making things worse by exacerbating tensions and entrenching divisions.

This turnaround reveals an essential truth about the widespread anti-war sentiment of the past two or three years: it is shallow and changeable; it was a tactical disagreement over the timing and conduct of the Iraq war rather than a political challenge to the right of Western intervention or an exposé of the West's pretensions to be a force for good in an out-of-control and often immoral Third World. As a result, anti-war feeling can easily become a pro-war demand. Outrage over the bombing of Iraq can easily transform into outrage that the international community is not doing more, in this instance, to punish the Sudanese government, rein in the Janjaweed rebels, and 'Save Darfur'. Because it was motivated by a kind of narcissistic sense of moral outrage, rather than by a critique of the idea that the West has a moral responsibility to intervene in other states' affairs to protect the downtrodden, today's anti-war politics can just as readily serve the Western powers as embarrass them - and just as easily encourage as oppose destabilising and destructive interventions.

It is striking the extent to which opponents of the Iraq war are doing exactly the same with Darfur as they attacked Bush for doing with Iraq and more recently Iran: reducing it to a simple black-and-white issue and calling for a moral crusade to make it all better. Bush was lambasted by Clooney, numerous other celebs and media commentators for believing there was such a thing as good and evil, and that America was good and Saddam was evil. The president was mocked (and rightly so) when he implied that God had advised him to intervene in Iraq; more recently he was ridiculed for reportedly having a 'messianic vision' of 'saving Iran' (3).

Yet now Clooney declares of Darfur: 'It's not a political issue. There is only right or wrong.' (4) Got that? There are no political or territorial questions in Darfur to worry your pretty little heads about; it is a simple morality tale of bad guys beating up on good guys....

...What the anti-war critics really disliked about Bush's moral posturing over Iraq, and to a certain extent Iran, is that it was unsophisticated: it was a bit too Christian and crass and clumsy for their tastes. They much prefer a secular, supposedly 'humanitarian' form of moral posturing, one which discusses conflicts in terms of 'right and wrong' rather than using the archaic categories of 'good and evil'. However, the end result is precisely the same: someone else's conflict, other people's trials and tribulations, are reduced to a simple story that apparently has a simple solution - the intervention of the international community. Difficult questions about politics, territory, resources and development, and also about how Western intervention in Africa, including in Sudan, has proved disastrous over the decades, are discarded in favour of saying 'we are good, they are bad, let's act'. That might make Clooney and Co feel all good and moist about themselves, but it is unlikely to do anything to assist anyone in Darfur or Sudan more broadly....