In Rod Lurie’s first political potboiler, Deterrence, a U.S. president audaciously entered a nuclear confrontation with a newly aggressive (and surprisingly well-armed) Saddam Hussein. While hardly an original concept in 2000, the year of the film’s release, Deterrence offered a crucial kick: The president making these threats was Jewish, and therefore his every decision was perceived (fairly or not) through the prism of his religion and his assumed loyalty to Israel. Indeed, as the time for button-pushing neared, even his closest advisors began to wonder how many Americans their guy was willing to sacrifice in order to protect the Holy Land.

The above paragraph could easily launch a discussion of the bizarre spectacle staged yesterday by controversial National Intelligence Council nominee Charles Freeman, who blamed the apparently nefarious “Israel lobby” for forcing him to withdraw from consideration. The influence of AIPAC, and the third-rail effect of giving too much weight to Arab concerns when discussing Israel’s security, are fascinating topics – but they’re not the ones I’m interested in today. (Feel free to discuss them in the comments section.)

Instead, I’m interested in another ethnic president — and the possibility that his very ethnicity may have some impact, positive or negative, on our desire or ability to finally get something done in Darfur.

This has been another momentous week in the planet’s longest-running human disaster. Last Wednesday, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and Bashir responded by expelling all international aid groups and NGOs from Darfur. The Obama administration’s initial response was, in a word, pathetic: a State Department spokesman noted that throwing out the NGOs “is certainly not helpful to the people who need aid.” You think?

A follow-up response at the United Nations was a bit more vigorous, but the fact remains that, less than three weeks before the onset of the region’s rainy season, nearly 2 million Darfuris stand to lose their access to adequate shelter, health services and/or potable water. Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who has been shouting valiantly into the wind on this subject for six years now, warned this week that by cutting off the food, medicines and water-extraction assistance that has helped them survive in Darfur’s massive refugee camps, Bashir is once again committed to killing Darfuris en masse. Susan Rice, Obama’s U.N. ambassador, called the move “genocide by other means.”

Darfur, of course, is one more foreign-policy catastrophe that Obama has inherited from the previous administration. There’s no question that Darfur has always been a complex problem, strategically speaking – the Western allies’ dismay over the fate of the region balanced against China’s refusal to brook punishment of its Sudanese oil-trading partners. Still, the fact is that more could have been done on the Darfuris’ behalf all these years, and China’s obstinacy could have been overcome, had Americans and Europeans considered Darfur to be in our nations’ strategic interests. (more…)