Appeasement Driven by Oil, The Bush Administration and Darfur

The Bush administration is now in the habit of hurling the charge of "appeasement" at critics of its Iraq war. Anyone who has followed the President's stance toward Sudan closely will appreciate the deep irony.

President Bush has targeted "Islamo-fascists" across the globe as successors to the Nazis, while likening his own position to that of Roosevelt and Churchill in World War II. "We're in a war we didn't ask for," he recently declared, "but it's a war we must wage and a war we will win."

Never mind that the war he "didn't ask for" began with a preemptive shock-and-awe strike on Iraq, based on fabricated evidence, or that his administration has done more to fan the flames of Islamist extremism around the world than to contain it. Just focus on that charge of "appeasement." Only when we shift the spotlight from the President's critics to George Bush himself and his stance toward Sudan's troubled western province, Darfur, does the charge make any kind of sense.

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