Whose credibility is really at stake?

Speaking to the United Nations General Assembly, President Bush warned that the UN's credibility is at stake over its failure to act in Darfur. While Bush may be correct, and while his vocal push for the UN to send a peacekeeping force to Darfur, as per Security Council resolution 1706, is welcome and commendable, it is nonetheless disturbing that he continues to dump the entirety of the blame for the failure of the international community to stop or even slow the brutal Darfur genocide in the past three years. This is distasteful, erroneous, and counterproductive on a number of levels. First of all, it carelessly glides over the fact that the United States - financially, politically, militarily, and even geographically (headquarters are, after all, in New York) - is the single most important country in the UN. Thus to label something a failure of the UN effectively translates into a failure of the US. What Bush is thinking about in making these threatening statements to the world body, however, is not whether or not he is adhering to logic; rather, he is making a conscious decision on how to best deflect criticism for his own lack of action vis-a-vis Darfur. Scolding the UN is doubly effective; it makes it appear as if the US is committed to anti-genocide action - and, appealing to the large segment of the population disenchanted with the course of events in Iraq, does so in a multilateral way - and it gives a target for any frustration with the murderously persistent chaos in Darfur. In what surely resounds with the many UN-bashers that President Bush can count on backing him up on anything critical of the UN, up to and beyond refusing to pay dues and/or abolishing the entire body, if Americans can perceive this genocide as the UN's responsibility - which is easy to do given the lack of strategic interests in western Sudan and the post-Iraq hangover among both progressives and isolationists - then this obviates the White House from any meaningful concrete action. Administration officials can continue to whine about the horrors of the genocide and give the standard party line about US humanitarian aid and support of the peace process, and Bush can even abstractly voice committment to some sort of NATO (logistical) support, but as long as he can count on no significant political backlash, his efforts will remain vacuous. The terrifying thing is, that this strategic appeasement goes beyond the majority of Americans, who care or know little about Darfur anyway, but in fact probably even reaches into the ranks of the few committed activists. Among the 20,000 in New York this weekend, how many will cheer Bush's remarks to the General Assembly without a second thought as to the ulterior, sinister motivations - utterly consistent with American history - of deflecting attention from genocide while steadfastly refusing to take decisive action? It is our duty as activists to see through disingenousness, and to continue to demand real action, sans equivocation, sans finger-pointing, and sans the emptiness of rhetoric.