United Nations -- Washington threatened sanctions against Sudan if it doesn't make significant progress in arresting marauding Arab militias within 30 days, in a revised UN resolution circulated yesterday.

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A year after the attack "without the lifesaving medicine [the destroyed facilities] produced, Sudan's death toll from the bombing has continued, quietly, to rise... Thus, tens of thousands of people -- many of them children -- have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis, and other treatable diseases... [The factory] provided affordable medicine for humans and all the locally available veterinary medicine in Sudan. It produced 90 percent of Sudan's major pharmaceutical products... Sanctions against Sudan make it impossible to import adequate amounts of medicines required to cover the serious gap left by the plant's destruction.... [T]he action taken by Washington on Aug. 20, 1998, continues to deprive the people of Sudan of needed medicine.

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Jonathan Belke, Boston Globe, Aug. 22, 1999.

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This only scratches the surface. The U.S. bombing "appears to have shattered the slowly evolving move towards compromise between Sudan's warring sides" and terminated promising steps towards a peace agreement to end the civil war that had left 1.5 million dead since 1981, which might have also led to "peace in Uganda and the entire Nile Basin." The attack apparently "shattered...the expected benefits of a political shift at the heart of Sudan's Islamist government" towards a "pragmatic engagement with the outside world," along with efforts to address Sudan's domestic crises," to end support for terrorism, and to reduce the influence of radical Islamists. [Mark Huband, Financial Times, Sept. 8, 1998]

In this respect, we may compare the crime in the Sudan to the assassination of Lumumba, which helped plunge the Congo into decades of slaughter, still continuing; or the overthrow of the democratic government of Guatemala in 1954, which led to 40 years of hideous atrocities; and all too many others like it.

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Me too!

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...
There was law in the land
Order in the home
Swimmin' in the river back then
...

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Lambchop? The Supremes? Elvis? Jim Morrison? Robert Merrill?

Wayne and Shuster?

They were the world. At the time. A rilly big shoe.

And yes, klar, a vicious and racist (or just, ahem, old fashioned) unrepresentative central government. I would like to see their ass kicked. (But really, what would that solve? If it doesn't address the deeper issues?)

And, yes, I'm highly suspicious of the current interest in it as an issue from the likes of Blair and Powell. Why didn't they speak up long, long ago? While Darfur is a new boil, the disease and it's symptoms have been around for decades, with massive population displacements, hardships, brutality, etc.

Are they looking around for some convenient distraction from Iraq? Are they looking for somewhere to carry on some sort of Muslim-baiting/fight against terrorism?

It's a good target - no military threat to speak of, and another one of these splendid, incredibly rich ancient cultures that haven't been trashed by the west yet, why not? Not since Gordon in Khartoum, and he got his arse kicked.

And they have oil! Poifect!

As for an Al Queda presence? The place is unimaginably poor, beyond the imagination of most people I expect...to make hay out of that possibility would be like getting upset about bad hair on someone with terminal cancer; Al Queda would be merely an opportunistic infection.