The decision by the Democratic Party platform committee to oppose any U.S. action aimed at “regime change” is a setback for the cause of preventing future genocides.
“Democrats believe the United States should not impose regime change on other countries and reject that as the goal of U.S. policy toward Iran,” the 2020 platform reads.
Many are understandably jittery about trying to change other countries’ governments. They recall the casualties suffered during the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the chaos in Libya following Western intervention, and the triumph of Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt and Gaza after the U.S. pressed for elections there.
Yet there also have been instances in which U.S. intervention successfully ousted dictators and involved relatively few casualties, such as Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, and Haiti in 1994.
Just as Democratic delegates were voting to oppose regime change, a trial began 6,000 miles away reminding the public why regime change is sometimes necessary. In the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, the country’s former dictator, Omar al Bashir, is now standing trial, but not for perpetrating the Darfur genocide.
From 2003 to 2005, Bashir sponsored Arab militias that slaughtered some 400,000 non-Arab residents of Sudan’s Darfur region. During the 2008 presidential campaign, candidate Barack Obama appropriately chastised the Bush administration for its completely inadequate response to Darfur. “I won’t turn a blind eye to slaughter” of civilians abroad, he vowed.
Less than six weeks after Obama took office, the International Criminal Court indicted Bashir for “murdering, exterminating, raping, torturing, and forcibly transferring large numbers of civilians, and pillaging their property.”
Flouting the indictment, Bashir traveled openly to numerous Arab and African countries. Not only did the U.S. not attempt to capture him, but Obama refrained from even criticizing those regimes for hosting Bashir. He also blocked a congressional attempt to penalize those governments. The U.S. envoy to Sudan, Princeton Lyman, said publicly, “We do not want to see the ouster of the [Bashir] regime, nor regime change.”
There was a human cost to that U.S. policy. Although the genocide itself ended — “There are no more villages left to burn,” a U.N. official explained — sporadic atrocities continued. In 2012, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof reported that Bashir was carrying out “mass atrocities that echo Darfur” against non-Arab tribes in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains. Kristof wrote, “I am not only embarrassed by my government’s passivity but outraged by it. … We now have the spectacle of a Nobel Peace Prize winner in effect helping to protect [one] of the most odious regimes in the world.”
Bashir only left office after being forcibly ousted by his opponents, not through any international action. The trial now underway in Khartoum concerns only his illegal rise to power in 1989, not the genocide he perpetrated. The new Sudanese government may yet hand him over to the International Criminal Court, but lives could have been saved through early and decisive U.S. action to oust or arrest Bashir and future mass murderers deterred.
Democrats’ 1996 platform criticized the Republicans for “standing aloof as war and genocide spread throughout the former Yugoslavia.” It praised President Bill Clinton for his airstrikes there and his role in facilitating the changing of regimes in Haiti and South Africa.
Their 2000 platform continued in that spirit. “America did right in the Balkans, and now we must finish the job” of removing Serbia “from the grip of Slobodan Milosevic,” it vowed. As for Iraq’s Saddam Hussein: “We will work to see him out of power,” the Democrats promised. It even gave this doctrine a name: “Forward Engagement.”
By 2004, however, the president was a Republican, and the entire tone of the Democrats’ platform was transformed. “Forward Engagement” disappeared, and the new focus was to accuse the Republicans of “rushing to force” and “going it alone” overseas. The Democrats urged a foreign policy based on expanding NATO, embracing U.N. initiatives, and creating new international agencies and mechanisms.
In 2008, with Bush leaving office, the Democrats’ focus on international alliances was set aside, and the question of intervening in human rights crises abroad was left up in the air. There was a vague reference to “upholding shared values whenever they are threatened by autocratic practices, coups, human rights abuses, or genocide” and a promise to “champion accountability for genocide” with no explanation as to how that would be accomplished.
The 2012 platform was something of a hodgepodge, reflecting the views of a president who sometimes condemned U.S. interference and sometimes practiced it. “America will not impose any system of government on another country,” the platform promised, before praising Obama for “intervening [to] end Muammaar Qadhafi’s” brutal reign and pledging to “work to hasten the end of the Assad regime and support a political transition to a stable and democratic Syria.”
The 2016 platform, however, went from vowing to “hasten Assad’s end” to seeking “a negotiated political transition that ends Assad’s rule.” This year’s platform reduces that to “finding a political resolution for this horrific war.”
Thus, Democrats have steadily retreated from intervention in recent years. But there is also ample precedent to adopt a “Forward Engagement”-style position on confronting perpetrators of genocide, or at least to leave it to the president to handle the issue on a case-by-case basis.
Instead, pending final approval by the delegates at the convention, they have declared in advance that the U.S. should never seek to change any regime. They have even singled out Iran’s theocracy, the world’s most aggressive rogue regime, as a government the existence of which the U.S. should accept perpetually. This platform tells Iran’s leaders that they do not have to fear U.S. intervention if they continue sponsoring international terrorism and developing nuclear weapons.
Party platforms do not bind presidents. But they are important both as weather vanes and as guideposts. Platforms reflect the mood of the party and can play a role in shaping its future direction on policy. It is distressing that this platform should include a policy of tolerating genocidal regimes.
Rafael Medoff is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington and is the author of more than 20 books about the Holocaust and Jewish history.
