Darfur: My Solution

Kevin Drum was just saying that we'd need something on the order of 30,000 troops in Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur. It's not going to happen, he says, because where are those troops going to come from? Nobody in the world is prepared to volunteer troop strength of anywhere near that magnitude.

He's right that it's not going to happen, but it should, and we should be the ones to provide the troops. Whatever it is that our troops are doing in Iraq, they're really not doing that much good. So the next 30,000 troops that rotate out of Iraq, don't replace them with fresh troops - send those fresh troops to Darfur, where they will save tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of lives.

That'll leave our people spread a bit thin in Iraq, but I've got a solution for that too. We're building - or really 'have built,' by now - four huge 'enduring bases' in Iraq, with tens of thousands of troops doing nothing but run each base. For instance, the Washington Post reports of one of the four bases,

Of the 20,000 troops at Balad, only several hundred have jobs that take them off base. Most Americans posted here never interact with an Iraqi, and some never see one, said Army Lt. Col. Larry Dotson, who is effectively the city manager.

Sounds like we could shut down an 'enduring base' or two, reassign the troops running those bases to more mission-critical roles, and the Iraqis wouldn't be able to tell that there'd been any change in troop levels.

Why not?