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General Evans and His Fate
An army man without troops is a sad sight. A civilian
without military training who yearns for command is even sadder. Perhaps
that is what makes the enterprise of General Evans so admirable: putting
both these handicaps aside, and defying history, the President of the
International Crisis Group is now proposing a major campaign in the Sudan.
Born the son of a tram-driver, General Gareth John Evans
spent most of his career in the Australian Labor Party, where he was soon
noted for his adventurous spirit. In the 1980s he became Attorney-General,
and it was then—due doubtless to a small misunderstanding about his
title—that he first showed signs of military ambition. Disturbed by what he
saw as the secessionist tendencies of the Tasmanians, he arranged to have
the Royal Australian Air Force monitor their rebellious activities from the
air. This led to his being nicknamed “Biggles”.
A master tactician at a time when his party needed all
the help it could get, he first wooed and then bedded the leader of a rival
party, persuading her to defect to his own. At the time this was regarded as
both a personal and political coup. Such conquests eventually persuaded him
that Australia was too small a field for his endeavors. One continent was
not enough. If the world was to benefit from his gladiatorial gifts they
required more scope—and in Darfur’s boundless sands he has at last found an
arena.
On June 6th 2005, in The Wall Street
Journal, he asked that “a battalion group (infantry plus support
elements) should be deployed in each of the eight sectors, along with a
ninth battalion in reserve, 700 to 1,000 military observers, 1,500 to 2,000
civilian police, and 1,000 headquarters and other staff. After all, with
Darfur we are talking about an area the size of France of Texas with a
population of some six million; well over two million of them already have
been forced out of their homes.”
It is understood that General Evans is in the capable
hands of some military outfitters, and that once he is battle-ready he will
be leaving for the front.
* * *
The New Class is indeed a problem—and General Evans is a
typical representative. For fifty years or more Australian universities have
been overproducing leftist intellectuals—men and women for whom, alas, there
is less and less public demand. In arts, this demi-educated campus spillage
went into journalism, the media, or incestuously back into the ranks of the
academy itself.
In law and government, where many students joined the
Labor Club and acquired a deep aversion to making things, selling things, or
doing anything useful, the majority wound up in politics. There they
regulated the makers and sellers, scolded those who did useful things, and
told people what they should buy.
Above all the New Class saw itself as the custodian of
ideals in a world which otherwise had no serious ideals at all; and it has
for several decades been feeding on a heady mix of notions—some ecological,
some redistributive, some aiming at perpetual peace in our time—all more or
less visionary and out of touch.
The General’s pronouncements on Sudan embody this state
of mind. The notion that troops from the African Union can do anything much
to improve the situation in Darfur is pure hallucination. The accompanying
idea that backs this up—that if the AU fails, then NATO should “provide and
lead the additional troops in the numbers and time frame required”—is even
more absurd. In fact, by the time the reader finishes his Wall Street
Journal article it’s obvious that Evans himself knows how unrealistic his
proposals are, for he feebly concludes with talk about “African and European
sensitivities”, with doubts about the adequacy of “small multination battle
groups”, and with an entirely appropriate pessimism about Europe’s
willingness to act.
Yet even more striking is the General’s complete
incomprehension of the problem. Despite his bold talk about battalions and
battle groups, the strife in Sudan is not something that has a military
solution. Whole decades of ethnic, tribal, and religious animosity among
dozens of different groups underlie the continual raids and reprisals going
on, scattered over an enormous and unmanageable region, and it is quite
likely that if regiments of European soldiers were sent into the middle of
this they would be shot at by everyone. As much for target practice as
anything else.
* * *
But let us look on the bright side and see if some good
can come from his initiatives nonetheless. I think it can. If General Evans
can be persuaded to go to the front himself—once he has been suitably kitted
out and given a musket of contemporary design—and he is then put in command
of the troops, the resulting debacle will be a salutary lesson for all those
eager to intervene in conflicts we would dearly like to stop, but which any
sane person knows can only be finally settled by the combatants themselves.
The fate of Colonel Hicks and his 10,000 men will be nothing compared
to the fate of General Evans. It should however make military history of a
kind. [A more technical discussion of the problems
represented by Evans and his like can be found on this site at Guardianship: the Utopia
of the New Class.]
July 2005
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