Not Lieven him be

Further on Darfur and on Anatol Lieven, I have received a couple more comments. From Sean Coleman:

Thanks for providing a link to that FT piece by Anatol Lieven casting aspersion on Darfur activists. I actually had a run-in online with some far left types earlier this summer, who attacked me as a member of of the "bomb Sudan fraternity" and, rather pleasingly, an "oxymoronic neoconservative humanitarian". My small efforts were derided as part-and-parcel of an American attempt to dominate Sudanese oilfields. It surprises me little that such screeds are common among SWP and Counterpunch types, but a writer of Lieven's stature should know better. (I suppose this kind of thing is symptomatic of the "ethical realism" he seeks to promote in his new book).

Incidentally, Lieven mentions with approval Mahmood Mamdani's shoddy work on Darfur, which appeared in the LRB. My response to it, among those of more note, is here.

And from Jeff Weintraub:

Had I not been on the road, I might also have been tempted to write about that piece by Anatol Lieven that you correctly criticized, since it's a paradigm example of an especially unpleasant and dishonest genre of moral and political argument (or, rather, insinuation). Now that I have a few moments' access to e-mail, I wanted to say that your remarks about his piece, although mild, were right on target.

I did also want to add one small caveat. At one point you say that "one way or another, we are talking about tens of thousands of dead". I can see why you wanted to be judicious in your claims here, but this is granting the bad guys too much. Of course, estimates of the numbers of victims of the Darfur atrocity are unavoidably uncertain and controversial. But among SERIOUS estimates, the minimum numbers are in the HUNDREDS of thousands. (The main controversies are whether the totals are closer to 200,000 or 450,000... and I find the higher ranges more convincing myself.)

My reply to Jeff:

You are, of course, right about the Darfur numbers - and you guessed my motivation: focusing on the issue I was, I didn't want to get involved in the numbers game since Lieven's argument is reprehensible even if they're at the lower end. In addition, I availed myself of the 'convenience' that tens of thousands is true even when hundreds of thousands is true.