From: Hailemelekot, Jonathan (Jonathan_Hailemelekot@cable.comcast.com)
Date: Thu Mar 12 2009 - 14:02:29 EST
March 11, 2009 -- The arrest warrant issued by the British-controlled
International Criminal Court against Sudan's President Bashir is
applauded as a "strategic move with profound geopolitical implications,"
by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a war-crazed
neoconservative think tank.
In a statement published March 6, the Foundation gloats that the arrest
warrant "accelerates the ongoing disintegration of the Sudanese state."
The statement argues that "There is now almost no reasonable expectation
that [this year's scheduled Sudan] general elections... will actually
take place," and "South Sudan [may] go its own way, taking with it some
90% of Sudan's proven oil reserves. Hence, when the election in July
fails to take place, most South Sudanese are likely to draw their own
conclusions and the regional government may well proceed to a unilateral
declaration of independence.... Whether the secession takes place
peacefully or a new north-south conflict erupts, the practical result
will be the same: the rulers in Khartoum will be deprived of [these oil]
revenues...."
In 2004, this Foundation for the Defense of Democracies hosted the
launch of a new Committee on the Present Danger, reviving the Cold
War-era CPD to try to drive the Bush-Cheney preventive war doctrine
forward toward a general conflagration of permanent war.
J. Peter Pham, the neo-conservative author of the Foundation's March 6
statement (entitled "ICC Arrest Warrant for Sudan's Bashir Has Both
Humanitarian and Strategic Consequences"), is himself vice president of
the Association for the study of the Middle East and Africa, whose
chairman is British imperial strategist Bernard Lewis; Anglo-American
Pinochet-supporter George P. Shultz is on the board under Lewis.