The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum hosted an event last night with Susan Rice, which was billed as a conversation about genocide prevention and timed to the one year anniversary of a high-level report on the topic.  The Q and A was not earth-shattering, but her fluid articulation of the challenges facing the United Nations and the United States in confronting genocide and mass atrocity did re-enforced every positive bias I have toward my UN Ambassador.  

I do think that those who follow the Darfur situation closely will be intrigued by the following exchange in which Michael Abramowitz, Rice's interlocutor for the evening and the the director of the museum's Committee on Conscience, presses Rice to elaborate on the set of incentives and pressures the Obama administration is willing to use to secure the Sudanese government's cooperation on Darfur and South Sudan.  You'll remember that last week, U.S. Sudan Envoy Scott Gration denied that such a list even existed.  Well, not only does Rice say that the list exists, but that the President himself has signed-off on benchmarks by which all parties to the conflict will be held. 

MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ: Do you think there have been any consequences for the perpetrators in Darfur?
 

SUSAN RICE: Not enough. I mean, there’s an ICC arrest warrant for the president of Sudan, Bashir, whom we and others believe to have been complicit in crimes against humanity -- we say genocide -- and yet he continues to govern. He travels relatively freely. And the only indicted war criminal to submit to justice in the context of Darfur has been one of the rebel leaders, who voluntarily showed up in The Hague. So I think there’s no question that there has not been accountability for them.
Now, will there be consequences? The United States has imposed in the past sanctions on Sudan, not only for what has transpired in Darfur, for its support for terrorism, for its atrocities and human rights abuses in -- in the context, the longstanding context of the North-South conflict.
And the president’s new policy for Sudan highlights, first of all, the importance he attaches to effective action. It balances three very important and simultaneous priorities: one, ending mass atrocities, killings, violence, genocide in Darfur; two, effectively implementing the North-South peace agreement, the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, so that the final stage of a just and fair referendum can occur and the people of Southern Sudan can determine their own future; and preventing Sudan from again serving as a safe haven for international terrorists, like Al Qaida.
Those are three important core goals that are essential to our interests to regional peace and security. And we have clearly defined in each of those three areas specific benchmarks against which the behavior of the parties will be measured. We will review progress in achieving those benchmarks at a high level, interagency, on a quarterly basis. And we will assess, as the president set...

MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ: So there are benchmarks in...

SUSAN RICE: Absolutely, very specific benchmarks.

MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ: ... that have been agreed to by the senior officials in the government?

SUSAN RICE: By the highest officials, including the president of the United States, and by us at the principals level. And those benchmarks relate to very specific in each of those three areas. We have...

MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ: Have you communicated those benchmarks to the Sudanese government?

SUSAN RICE: We have communicated our expectations to all the parties involved, including the government of Sudan. But if I might just continue for a second...

MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ: Please. I’m sorry.

SUSAN RICE: ... then we have also, very specifically, outlined both the incentives we are prepared to deploy for positive behavior and positive progress, measurable, tangible, not rhetorical, but practical progress for steps along those benchmarks, as well as the pressures, sanctions, and punitive measures that we would be prepared to take for -- and this is important -- for the status quo persisting, because the status quo is inherently unacceptable, and/or for backsliding by the parties with respect to those benchmarks.
And we’ll have this quarterly review, and we will take decisions in light of the facts on the ground, as to how to proceed. And, in fact, if you look at the president’s speech in Oslo today, he -- he spoke about this, not only in the context that you highlighted, of human rights abuses or cases of Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, but he explained that this approach of engagement and pressure for which there’s no magic formula, no cookie-cutter model, is, in fact, the basis of our approach in many complex situations, from Iran to Zimbabwe or Burma.

On Meet the Press on Sunday, Susan Rice explained why the United Nations remains vital to American interests, despite the Chavez-Ahmidenjad-Kadaffi General Assembly side-show.  

GREGORY: Finally, you -- talking about the United Nations, the body where you are now serving as our ambassador. Recently during the U.N. General Assembly Meeting in New York, Americans saw this kind of parade of anti-Americanism. You see Chavez of Venezuela, Ahmadinejad of Iran and Gadhafi -- who, you know, may still be speaking for as far as we know. You once said that the U.N. is imperfect but it is also indispensable.

When you look at that showing, what is the indispensable part?

RICE: David, there are 192 countries in the United Nations. You picked out three that provided some barroom drama during the course of the General Assembly. The United Nations is critically important to our national security because it is the one place that we can marshal with the force of law the commitment of other nations to do things that we need to protect our security.

For example, when we got the Security Council last June to pass the toughest sanctions on the books today against any country in the world, North Korea, we got something that was much more powerful than anything we could muster on our own. We are not able, given transnational threats, proliferation, terrorism, climate change, pandemic, to tackle these challenges along. No country is, even one as powerful as our own. We need to marshal the active support of others.

Now, sometimes the U.N. falls short, it doesn’t do all that we want it to do, and particularly in cases like human rights and -- and cases of atrocities.

And that’s an area where we need to -- to push for improvements. But when it comes to issues of critical importance to our security, like proliferation, like terrorism, we have seen progress come from the United Nations when we can get them to come together and pressure countries like North Korea to do what is necessary to keep us and others safer.

I've been on vacation for the past week-plus, so I missed the (admittedly not very "new") news that North Korea wants to join "a specific and reserved form of dialogue" -- in other words, the bilateral talks with the United States that Pyongyang has long sought.

Is this business as usual with North Korean diplomacy, is it the strategic counterweight to its past couple months of brazen missile launches, or is it, as FP's Brian Fung suggested, "a unique opportunity" for making progress?

I respect Brian's points -- that the six-party talks haven't been too successful, that the resulting stalemate may have benefitted North Korea's cause, and that the specific aims of the other five parties have been frustratingly divergent -- but I'm not as open to his conclusion. Not that I support the misguided notion that meeting with the leaders of nefarious countries should be held out as some kind of "reward;" that's nonsense, as I've blogged previously. But one should be a bit suspicious before acceding to exactly what North Korea wants -- particularly when, as in this case, the issue is actually one of excluding other parties, not whether or not to conduct diplomacy.

Going at the North Korean nuclear issue through the six-party talks is the only acceptable option here for precisely the reason that the relevant actors -- China, the United States, South Korea, Japan, and Russia -- are "working at cross-purposes" on seemingly everything else. In other words, North Korea's nuclear program is the only thing they do agree on -- namely, that Pyongyang should not be in possession of nuclear weapons. North Korea, of course, feels differently, but backing out of the six-party talks would be as short-sighted as has been the U.S. policy of insisting on North Korean disarmament before any concessions are made. Bilateral negotiations aren't a concession, but the only way I see them working is as part of a communicative regional strategy.

(Maybe North Korea's real purpose in seeking bilateral talks with the United States is to gain the know-how to upgrade its fastfood offerings from "minced beef and bread" to a verifiable hamburger.)

I just got around to reading Tom Friedman's column from the other day about Kirkuk Iraq. It's odd in a number of ways, from his love of using jokes to make a point, to his blithe assumption that the U.S. military has "left a million acts of kindness" in the country, and his bizarre contention that Iraq is "100 times more important" than Bosnia (what is the point of a powder keg competition between the Middle East and the Balkans, anyway?). But this is what struck me most from Friedman's outlook:

Senior Iraqi officials are too proud to ask for our help and would probably publicly resist it, but privately Iraqis will tell you that they want it and need it. We are the only trusted player here — even by those who hate us. They need a U.S. mediator so they can each go back to their respective communities and say: "I never would have made these concessions, but those terrible Americans made me do it."

First, I have a hard time believing that Thomas Friedman can reliably attest to the private desires of most Iraqis (especially when he is writing from Kirkuk, but makes no mention that Kurds, who form a substantial part of Kirkuk's population, have a notably different outlook toward Americans). Second, I have an even harder time believing that six-plus years of military occupation has made Iraqis "want" and "need" more American help (something tells me that simply observing the diversity of American military personnel has not, as Friedman weakly argues, made an impression on Iraq's own ethnic politics). I don't believe for an instant that "those who hate us" trust the United States simply because it has been there for a long time.

Third, the United States is not the "only" purportedly neutral party in Iraq. The UN, I'd wager, has a lot more public support, and, more importantly, can lay a better claim to being an objective mediator. Rather than advocate what seems an entirely collapsible and unsustainable strategy of blaming concessions on "those terrible Americans," Friedman should consider the political reconciliation work that the UN already is doing in Iraq, particularly in Kirkuk, which he, again, oddly fails to mention. Rest assured that it does not involve sending Iraqi mediators home with the implicit point of blaming "those terrible" UN types.

(image from flickr user Charles Haynes under a Creative Commons license)