Marketing Darfur (by Sebastian Mallaby, WP)

[gottaB]

I once wrote a column about the epic struggle between Eric Reeves and Madeleine Albright. Albright was the secretary of state at the time; Reeves was practically unheard of. He was a lover of Milton and Shakespeare who taught at Smith College in Massachusetts. He was also a private citizen so incensed about the long war in Sudan that he had taken a leave from his job to do something about it.

Reeves had the two weapons that modern agitators need: intellect and Internet. He mined the Web for Sudanese info, then e-mailed policymakers, church groups and members of the press, denouncing America's indifference to the conflict. Albright, who had made the mistake of saying that "the human rights situation in Sudan is not marketable to the American people," did not come off too well. Reeves hammered home the northern government's appalling tactics against the people of the south -- the condoning of slavery, the helicopter attacks on schools and hospitals, the ethnic cleansing of tribes that inconveniently inhabited oil fields. The Reeves e-mails were too authoritative to ignore. I first came across Reeves when a State Department official couldn't answer my questions and referred me to him.

It's worth recalling the Reeves-Albright battle because we seem likely to forget its lesson. President Bush's inflated rhetoric, together with Iraq's turmoil, may discredit the idea that foreign policy should be rooted in unabashedly moral claims: that the United States should spread freedom, right human wrongs, aspire to plant democracy. But the Eric Reeves story shows why U.S. foreign policy not only shouldn't lose its moral compass; in all likelihood it can't. For if America's leaders lapse into amoral word-mincing, ordinary citizens will rise up, and their protests will spread at broadband speed to every corner of the nation.

Reeves's campaign five years ago had a clear effect. His writings encouraged more and harsher press attention to Sudan; activists and church groups were energized; Western oil companies cut off their links with the country, and Albright's tone toughened. When the Bush administration took office the next year, evangelicals persuaded it to make Sudan a top Africa priority. Four years of high-level U.S. attention have driven Sudan's government to sign a peace deal with the south, signaling a victory for the moralist view of foreign policy. The United States has successfully exerted influence out of concern for human rights, and never mind that Sudan is supposedly not marketable.

Marketing Darfur....