White House Statement on Sudan

The White House has a new policy on Sudan, including calling the violence in Darfur genocide. Statement from the White House:

Today, my Administration is releasing a comprehensive strategy to confront the serious and urgent situation in Sudan.

For years, the people of Sudan have faced enormous and unacceptable hardship. The genocide in Darfur has claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and left millions more displaced. Conflict in the region has wrought more suffering, posing dangers beyond Sudan’s borders and blocking the potential of this important part of Africa. Sudan is now poised to fall further into chaos if swift action is not taken.

Our conscience and our interests in peace and security call upon the United States and the international community to act with a sense of urgency and purpose. First, we must seek a definitive end to conflict, gross human rights abuses and genocide in Darfur. Second, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the North and South in Sudan must be implemented to create the possibility of long-term peace. These two goals must both be pursued simultaneously with urgency. Achieving them requires the commitment of the United States, as well as the active participation of international partners. Concurrently, we will work aggressively to ensure that Sudan does not provide a safe-haven for international terrorists.

The United States Special Envoy has worked actively and effectively to engage all of the parties involved, and he will continue to pursue engagement that saves lives and achieves results. Later this week, I will renew the declaration of a National Emergency with respect to Sudan, which will continue tough sanctions on the Sudanese Government. If the Government of Sudan acts to improve the situation on the ground and to advance peace, there will be incentives; if it does not, then there will be increased pressure imposed by the United States and the international community. As the United States and our international partners meet our responsibility to act, the Government of Sudan must meet its responsibilities to take concrete steps in a new direction.

Over the last several years, governments, non-governmental organizations, and individuals, and from around the world have taken action to address the situation in Sudan, and to end the genocide in Darfur. Going forward, all of our efforts must be measured by the lives that are led by the people of Sudan. After so much suffering, they deserve a future that allows them to live with greater dignity, security, and opportunity. It will not be easy, and there are no simple answers to the extraordinary challenges that confront this part of the world. But now is the time for all of us to come together, and to make a strong and sustained effort on behalf of a better future for the people of Sudan.

Obama to Announce New Sudan Policy Oct. 19

The U.S. will engage Sudan to achieve its goals:

The new U.S. policy, which will be formally unveiled Monday, calls for a campaign of "pressure and incentives" to cajole the government in Khartoum into pursuing peace in the troubled Darfur region, settling disputes with the autonomous government in southern Sudan and providing the United States greater cooperation in stemming international terrorism, according to administration officials briefed on the plan. It also provides Khartoum with a path to improved relations with the United States if it begins to address long-standing U.S. concerns.

The public rollout of the policy brings an end to months of contentious internal debate on how to confront a government headed by an indicted war crimes suspect, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and blamed in the deaths of more than 300,000 people in Darfur, according to U.N. estimates.

In what is intended as a show of unity for the new policy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will announce it at the State Department with President Obama's special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration. Rice and Gration had battled fiercely over the direction of the new policy, with Rice pressing for a tougher line and Gration calling for easing U.S. sanctions. Read more at WaPo

The violence in Darfur will be called genocide:

The review also addresses a long-standing dispute between Rice, who has argued that there is an "ongoing genocide" in Darfur, and Gration over how to characterize the violence in Darfur. From now on, the United States will maintain that genocide "is taking place" in Darfur, officials said. The agreement on genocide represents a setback for Gration, who argued publicly in June that Sudan is no longer engaged in a campaign of mass murder in that region. "What we see is the remnants of genocide," he told reporters.

Envoy Scott Gration Visits Sudan

NYT: President Obama’s new envoy to Sudan has a tough job. He has to figure out how to get the Sudanese president who was just indicted for war crimes to reverse his decision to kick out 13 humanitarian groups working in Darfur.

Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, a retired Air Force officer, evidently has decided to try honey, not vinegar. While activists and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s decision to expel the aid groups, Mr. Gration, President Obama’s special envoy, on Wednesday publicly had nothing but pleasant words during his maiden mission to Khartoum.

Read a transcript here.

Obama To Name Scott Gration Sudan Envoy

Scott Gration was originally on the shortlist to head NASA, according to earlier media reports. In 2006, Gration accompanied Obama on a five-nation, 15-day tour of Africa.

AFP: US President Barack Obama will on Wednesday name retired Air Force general Scott Gration as his special envoy to Sudan to confront what Washington sees as a "horrendous" situation in Darfur.
The President "will be naming Scott Gration as special envoy to Sudan," an Obama administration official said on condition of anonymity.
The announcement will come as the United States ratchets up pressure on the government of Sudan's President Omar al-Beshir following his expulsion of international aid groups from Darfur that worsened the humanitarian crisis.
Former fighter pilot, Gration, a personal friend of Obama, was the pick of both the president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the official said.
Gration, who sometimes traveled with Obama on the campaign trail last year, had expertise on African issues and was also versed in the operational requirements of training peacekeepers and of airlift capabilities.

Gration's bio:

Gen. Jonathan S. Gration is the Director, Strategy, Policy, and Assessments, United States European Command, Stuttgart-Vaihingen, Germany. As Director of Strategy, Plans, and Policy, he is responsible for formulation and staff direction of the execution of basic military/political policy and planning for command activities involving relations with other US Unified Commands, allied military and international military organizations and subordinate commands. As Director of Capabilities and Assessments, he is responsible for the development of force structure requirements; conducting studies, analyses, and assessments; and for evaluating military forces, plans, programs, and strategies.

The general was raised in Africa and entered the Air Force in 1974 through the Air Force ROTC program at Rutgers University. He has previously served as a White House Fellow, operations group commander and two-time wing commander. Prior to assuming his current position, the general served as Director of Regional Affairs in the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs.

General Gration is a command pilot with more than 5,000 flight hours, including more than 2,000 hours as an instructor pilot. He has extensive combat experience in the Middle East and served as the Commander of Task Force West during Operation Iraqi Freedom. General Gration’s aerial combat experience includes 274 combat missions over Iraq (983 hours of combat time).

Obama's Foreign Policy Brain Trust

american prospect: What proves to be a more reliable indicator of presidential behavior is a candidate's roster of advisers. (If the press had paid better attention, the country would have seen through Bush's pitch about a humble foreign policy and realized that many of his advisers, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, were conspiracy-minded warmongers.) Obama's foreign-policy advisers come from diverse backgrounds. They are former aides to Democratic mandarins like Tom Daschle and Lee Hamilton (Denis McDonough and Ben Rhodes, respectively); veterans of the Clinton administration's left flank (Tony Lake and Susan Rice); a human-rights advocate who helped write the Army's and Marine Corps' much-lauded counterinsurgency field manual (Sarah Sewall); a retired general who helped run the air war during the invasion of Iraq (Scott Gration); and a former journalist who revolutionized the study of U.S. foreign policy (Samantha Power). Yet they form a committed, intellectually coherent, and surprisingly united foreign-affairs team. (Shortly before this piece went to press, Power resigned from the campaign after making an intemperate remark to a reporter.)

They also share a formative experience with each other and with Obama. Each opposed the Iraq War at a time when doing so was derided by their colleagues, by journalists, and by the foreign-policy establishment. Each did so because they understood that the invasion and occupation ran counter to the goal of destroying al-Qaeda. And each bore the frustration of endless lectures on their lack of so-called seriousness from those who suffered from strategic myopia.

"There is a popular notion that Democrats have to try to appear like Republicans to pass some test on national security. The fact that that's still the case after Iraq is absurd," says one of Obama's closest advisers. "So you break from that orthodoxy and say 'I don't care if the Republicans attack me because I'm willing to meet with the leadership in Iran. We haven't for 25 years, and it's not gotten us anywhere.'"
Most of the members of Obama's foreign-policy team expressed frustration that they had taken a well-considered and seemingly anodyne position on Iraq and suffered for it. Obama had something similar happen to him in the spring and summer of 2007. He was attacked from the left and the right for saying three things that should not have been controversial: that if he had actionable intelligence on the whereabouts of al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan but no cooperation from the Pakistani government, he would take out the jihadists; that he wouldn't use nuclear weapons on terrorist training camps; and that he would be willing to meet with leaders of rogue states in his first year as president. "No one [of Obama's critics] had thought through the policy because that was the quote-unquote naïve and weak position, so they said it was a bad position to take," recalls Ben Rhodes, the adviser who writes Obama's foreign-policy speeches. "And it was a seminal moment, because Obama himself said, 'No, I'm right about this!'"

Instead of backing down, Obama asked his foreign-policy team to double down. Rhodes wrote a speech that Obama delivered at DePaul University on Oct. 2, which criticized the boundaries of acceptable discourse set by the same establishment that backed the war. "This election is about ending the Iraq War, but even more it's about moving beyond it. And we're not going to be safe in a world of unconventional threats with the same old conventional thinking that got us into Iraq," Obama said. One of his advisers, recalling the fallout from Obama's comments about pursuing al-Qaeda in Pakistan, says, "He takes policy positions that are a break from both rigid orthodoxy and the Bush administration. And everyone says it's a gaffe! That just encapsulates everything that's wrong about the foreign-policy debate in Washington and in Democratic politics."

The Obama foreign-policy team describes it as "the politics of fear," a phrase most advisers used unprompted in our conversations. "For a long time we've not seen much creative thinking from Dems on national security, because, out of fear, we want to be a little different from the Republicans but not too different, out of fear of being labeled weak or indecisive," another top adviser says. Identifying that fear as the accelerant of the Iraq War mind-set is the first step to a new and innovative foreign policy. John Kerry was not able to argue for fundamental change in foreign policy because he was consumed by that very political fear. Obama's admonition to Democrats is much like Pope John Paul II's to the Gdansk shipyard strikers -- first, be not afraid.
the story is really good.