BRIEFING: "Sudan: A gleam among the ruins; After years of civil war, three new factors may bring hope to Africa's biggest country," The Economist, 22 November 2008.

The three factors are Obama's election, Omar al-Bashir's indictment by the ICC, and the upcoming national elections. The optimistic picture goes like this: al-Bashir gets voted out, then falls into ICC hands, and Obama--meanwhile--makes good on his promise to care more about humanitarian disasters. Hmmm. The pessimist in me says Obama's got way too much on his hands right now to afford a serious new intervention in Sudan. I also see most southerners in Sudan focused on the promised secession vote in 2011 rather than next year's election, which I think al-Bashir is now highly incentivized to win at all costs--given the ICC alternative. So I see the situation being effectively punted until the 2011 plebiscite, by which time Obama may be in a better position to actually do something when al-Bashir tries to prevent that vote from unfolding fairly and leading to Sudan's demise as a fake state. And yes, meanwhile, there will be a goodly amount of preventable deaths. But the same will be true in Ethiopia-Somalia due to the drought/famine and ongoing instabilities, plus the eastern Congo mess being reignited. But ignoring all this death is the price we continue paying for the choices Bush-Cheney made in the GWOT: the unilateralism and primacy stuff creating a strategic overhang that will take some time to burn off, much like the financial deleveraging.