I think there are sanctions that the US and Europe could apply that would be painful regardless of whether China continues to buy Sudanese oil: travel restrictions, high tech goods and services. There are also forms of military involvement I'm not personally against at this point: communications assistance, jamming, loan of intelligence flight aircraft. I'm not up enough on things to know where that would fit with the proposed $170M AU support in the FY 2006 bill.
But building an international consensus for action does matter. We used to be good at that, but have kind of thrown away the talent and the desire these days.
Thanks for your fair discussion of my post. Your earlier post about WMD evidence notwithstanding (it seems like more of the same to me), the case against military action in Darfur is harder than the case against action in Iraq should have been. That's not to say it's the right thing in Darfur yet, but I agree (obviously) that there's a major crime in progress there. The question is, what can a US that threw itself in the briar patch of Iraq do about it?
Thomas, I'm not at all sure that Europe would support sanctions; in terms of high tech, again, China will sell them whatever they want.
In terms of international consensus -- sure. Everybody talks a good line, until it's time to actually do something.
And, I'm not sure that Iraq should be considered a briar patch quite yet. Let's not write it off, yet -- as much as that would help partisan politicians.
But -- thanks for your kind comments. Your blog's pretty well informed, and I'll be referring to it from time to time.
I think we can tolerate a little disagreement.
Commenting by HaloScan
