Corzine Blogs, And We Are Not Impressed

Jon Corzine was one of the first to participate on The Huffington Post blog this past week, with his – How to Stop a Genocide. Right off the bat you can tell Corzine doesn’t think much of his potential readers with these lines:

My name is Jon Corzine, and I’m one of the two US Senators who represents (sic) the state of New Jersey. Most people don’t really know what a Senator does.

We know what a U.S. Senator is supposed to do, so we were curious what Jon Corzine was up to in the Senate. As far as we can tell he’s done nothing for the people of New Jersey – so what has he been doing?

In my case, among other things, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to prevent this country from being attacked.

In his case, Corzine tries to figure how to prevent an attack by traveling to Iraq and Chad. We never learn what Corzine’s going to Iraq had to do with figuring out how to prevent another attack, but he did discover American “soldiers are professionals in the most magnificant sense of the word..” (We couldn’t find “magnificant” in the dictionary, but we will assume Corzine was impressed with our soldiers.)

The Senator goes on to tell us he traveled to Chad because it’s right next door to Darfur in the Sudan, “where genocide is tearing a country apart.” A horrible crisis to be sure, but what does this have to do with attacks on the United States?

Here are a couple of interesting facts about the Sudan. First, there’s oil there. Second, Osama bin Laden used to spend time there before venturing to Afghanistan. Third, a fundamentalist strain of militant Islam is quite strong within the political culture. To top it all off the country is buffeted by civil war, and a brutal genocide. Over 2 million people have been displaced by the government trying to kill or starve them by preventing humanitarian aid from coming through.

Corzine then wanders into “pragmatic reasons for intervening to ameliorate this situation” and concludes “we are creating the conditions for the collapse of law and order in an entire region and, potentially, for terrorism.”

The “we” the Senator refers to is apparently the people of the United States. Interesting logic, no? The militant Islamic government of Sudan is slaughtering people, displacing and starving others and “we” are responsible for the collapse of law and order in the region and potentially, terrorism.

We submit law and order is already kaput in Sudan and genocide falls within our definition of terrorism. So it’s probably safe to say the situation has moved beyond ripe conditions and potential, into reality. Corzine provides the perfect example of blame America first – “we” did not create the conditions or commit the crimes currently taking place in Darfur, the leaders of the Sudan did.

Corzine then moves on to make the moral case for action. Now he starts to make some sense, the situation in Dafur is horrendous and should be stopped. Corzine tells us that it would be pretty easy to resolve the crisis in the Sudan.

So what can we do? What’s remarkable about this crisis is that it’s not that difficult a task to resolve the situation. The people perpetrating the genocide don't have a massive conventional army. They may stop if they think there will be consequences to their actions. The warlords are betting on our inaction, and so far, their bet is paying off.

So what’s Corzine’s solution? Get the United Nations to take action? Isn’t a crisis like the one in the Sudan the reason the U.N. supposedly exists? No, the Senator doesn’t mention the U.N, no solution to be found there. Leverage Senators’ Kerry, Kennedy or even his own influence with European leaders and get European governments to take action? Nope, no help to be found with the morally superior Europeans. Encourage Islamic countries to take action, the crisis is in their neighborhood and certainly Saudi Arabia has the resources to put a stop to these crimes against humanity. Not considered by Corzine in his post. So what’s a Senator to do?

I sponsored a bipartisan bill in the Senate that passed called the ‘Darfur Accountability Act’ to impose consequences and threaten these warlords. This bill would provide the tools to stop the genocide, including sanctions against those responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity, an arms embargo against the government of Sudan, and a no-fly zone over Darfur. It also calls for the appointment of a Special Envoy, whose job it would be to work with all the parties to bring an end to the crisis.

This is the easy solution - sanctions, embargos, no-fly zones and jaw boning? We tried those tactics on Iraq for more than 10 years and Saddam would still be filling the mass graves if the “Corzine” approach had continued. The Senator may have visited Iraq, but hasn’t learned a thing from recent events.

Moving along, Corzine now identifies the real villains responsible for the misery and suffering in the Sudan – the Republicans.

Last week, the Republicans in the House, with the support of the Bush Administration, neutered this bill by stripping out the most important provisions.

No mention of the important provisions that were stripped from his bill. Maybe the President and the House Republicans are not willing to make emtpy threats. Is Senator Corzine suggesting the United States take unilateral action and get involved in a civil war? Is he willing to commit the U.S. to military action should his proposed threats fail to stop the killing? The Senior Senator from New Jersey wasn’t willing to use military force against Saddam Hussein, are we to believe he would in this case? Please!

Why should the United States take on this problem while the rest of the world averts its collective eyes? This is a job for the United Nations. If the organization is unwilling or incapable of taking decisive action, then what is the point of wasting time and money on a useless debating society?

If the U.N. can’t pass this global test in Darfur, John Bolton should be dispatched to Turtle Bay’s Carnival of Corruption to shut it down. This still leaves us with the problem in Sudan. We will look to real foreign affairs experts to develop solutions, not a former bond trader looking to pad his resume for future political campaigns.

We look forward to learning about the “other things” Senator Corzine does, although it does seem a bit odd we have to read The Huffington Post to find out. Corzine's Bio on the blog mentions he has a long list of accomplishments, we still wonder what those might be:

Elected in 2000, Jon Corzine is the senior Senator from New Jersey. His long list of accomplishments includes spearheading legislation cracking down on Wall Street abuses (the Sarbanes-Oxley Act), and most recently pushing through the Senate the Darfur Accountability Act to end genocide in the Sudan.