Strange, isn't it, how reductive our world sometimes turns out to be? Bring up any subject these days -- try genocide in Darfur, for example -- and sooner or later you seem to end up talking about oil. At this moment, the world is experiencing an energy race. Think of it as the twenty-first century's equivalent of the arms races of the previous two centuries. Everywhere there is a hint of an energy source or resource, you find a mad dash for the (black) gold.

The Middle East may be the oil heartland of the planet, but in a world in which energy demand is on the rise and fears of limited energy reserves are rising as well, Africa, like Central Asia, suddenly finds itself in the crosshairs of oil exploration. The Pentagon is soon likely to announce the setting up of its own Africa Command, with new basing moves on the continent sure to follow. Though such developments are invariably presented in the context of the President's Global War on Terror, they are essentially energy moves.

As David Morse indicates below, we are hardly alone. In Sudan, for instance, along with the Europeans, the Chinese are now major players and the ongoing slaughter in Darfur turns out to be significantly connected to oil exploration. In late August, the Bush administration launched the mid-term election season in this country with a round of "appeasement" charges against the opponents of its war in Iraq. Morse, an expert on the situation in Sudan, considers that charge of "appeasement" in the context of the genocide in Darfur and the oil race in that region. Tom Engelhardt

The Bush Administration and Darfur
By David Morse

The Bush administration is now in the habit of hurling the charge of "appeasement" at critics of its Iraq war. Anyone who has followed the President's stance toward Sudan closely will appreciate the deep irony.

President Bush has targeted "Islamo-fascists" across the globe as successors to the Nazis, while likening his own position to that of Roosevelt and Churchill in World War II. "We're in a war we didn't ask for," he recently declared, "but it's a war we must wage and a war we will win."

Never mind that the war he "didn't ask for" began with a preemptive shock-and-awe strike on Iraq, based on fabricated evidence, or that his administration has done more to fan the flames of Islamist extremism around the world than to contain it. Just focus on that charge of "appeasement." Only when we shift the spotlight from the President's critics to George Bush himself and his stance toward Sudan's troubled western province, Darfur, does the charge make any kind of sense.

Identifying the Islamo-fascist Enemy

Let us speak plainly and in George W. Bush's own terms: Giving him the benefit of the doubt, let's assume that in his label of choice, "Islamo-fascist," his implied adjective is not Islamic, referring to the world's 1.3 billion Muslims, but Islamist, referring only to those fundamentalist Muslims who seek to impose their worldview on others.

Certainly, if any Islamist government deserves the epithet "fascist," it is the one established by the National Islamic Front (NIF), which seized control of Sudan in a military coup in 1989 and installed the country's current ruler, Lt. General Omar al-Bashir. The Front took over with a grandiose agenda that assumed the racial superiority of a northern Arab elite in a country that historically enslaved, and continues to enslave and marginalize, black Africans. Dominating the central government in the capital, Khartoum, the NIF Party sought to impose sharia, Muslim fundamentalist law, on all Sudan, including Christians and practitioners of indigenous African religions who lived in the South.

The Front's ambitions were too large even for a country of just under a million square miles, the largest in Africa. They extended to the rest of the continent and the Middle East as well. In the 1990s, Khartoum became an incubator for international terrorists, Osama bin Laden among them. Bashir viewed Sudan as the gateway for the Arabization and Islamification of all of Africa. His party's "totalitarian ideology," coupled with greed, prompted Khartoum to grab oilfields newly discovered in South Sudan by the simple expedient of redrawing jurisdictional boundaries in the early 1980s to deny them to the South. This triggered a bitter civil war that lasted twenty-two years and claimed the lives of an estimated two million Sudanese civilians, mainly poor, black subsistence farmers in the South. Most died of starvation when food supplies were cut off. Now, for similar reasons, a reprise of that tragedy has been unfolding in Darfur, the poorest region of Sudan.

If Khartoum's racism was muddied by the religious dimension of the North-South civil war, it is starkly evident in Darfur, where Arab Muslims are killing black Muslims. For the past three years, Arab militias on horseback and camel-back, armed and supported by Khartoum, and accompanied by aerial bombardment by government planes, have attacked non-Arab farming villages in Darfur -- murdering and raping, poisoning wells, seizing cattle and household goods, burning houses and mosques, and driving survivors from their land in a scorched-earth campaign of ethnic cleansing. Now some 3.5 million displaced Darfuris, roughly half the population, are wholly dependent on outside food aid.

Meanwhile, the NIF-controlled government prevents the citizens of Khartoum from grasping the genocidal nature of the campaign in Darfur -- by censoring the Sudanese media, shutting down newspapers, torturing activists, and denying visas to foreign journalists.

Here, in short, is a totalitarian regime with significant parallels to Nazi Germany, even if hardly on the same economic or military scale. It is also a regime arguably more murderous than that of Saddam Hussein, with a more expansionist agenda; a rogue state that has sponsored terrorism in the past and threatens to launch a jihad if the UN intervenes in Darfur. Earlier this year, Osama bin Laden issued a world-wide call for terrorists to go to the aid of Khartoum. Sudan has bona fide -- not fabricated -- ties to al-Qaeda. Khartoum is, in other words, everything Mr. Bush could wish for in an "Islamo-fascist" enemy.

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