Preventing Another Benghazi, and Rwanda

This Christmas week, the Obama administration, no doubt remembering the tragedy in Benghazi in the fall of 2012, has directed the Pentagon to aggressively re-position Marines. And, in a related move, the U.N. Security Council has convened, leading to the urgent passing yesterday of a resolution.

Stationed in Spain, US forces and aircraft were moved on Monday into the Horn of Africa, specifically to Djibouti, where America maintains its only permanent African base. And yesterday, fifty of those marines were moved again, from Djibouti into Entebbe, Uganda, to be closer - within 500 miles - to Juba, the capital of the world's newest country, South Sudan. Also yesterday, the U.N. Security Council approved a direct request from Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to send 5,500 more peacekeepers to South Sudan. This will nearly double the number of U.N. troops there, boosting efforts to protect tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians displaced from their homes, seeking refuge at U.N. bases in and around Juba and Bor, a state capital to the north.

All this comes in the midst of a report yesterday from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees of the discovery of at least two mass graves in the town of Bentiu, in oil-rich Unity state, and of reports of attacks and killings throughout the country based on ethnicity. Intense diplomatic efforts are underway, through the US Embassy in Juba, via Secretary Kerry's special envoy for South Sudan, Donald Booth, and from visiting Ethiopian and Kenyan leaders, to contain this growing ethnic violence that, it is feared, could morph into the next Rwanda or Somalia. South Sudan President Salva Kiir, an ethnic Dinka, maintains that an attempted military coup 10 days ago by his sacked Vice President, Riek Machar, an ethnic Nuer, set off the violence. But unrest in recent weeks had already escalated to the point that America's State Department ordered the evacuation of all Americans from the country; in one such operation this past weekend to remove Americans in Bor, three CV-22 Osprey military aircraft were hit by gunfire, four U.S. crew members were injured, and the three aircraft were forced to abort the mission and return to their Entebbe base.

Re-positioning its Marines, evacuating its citizens, and dispatching its envoys, are decisions that reflect America's experience last year in Benghazi, Libya when no U.S. forces were close enough to respond quickly to the attack that killed U.S. Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans. But America has broader interests in the region as well: for years it has strongly supported the development of a functional, democratic South Sudan to act as a hedge against the regime in Khartoum, which is considered a sponsor of terrorism, and against Sudan President al-Bashir personally, who has been indicted on charges of war crimes and genocide. And even more broadly, America knows that further instability in South-Sahel Africa will only serve to strengthen the influence of Islamist extremists, already exploiting political vacuums in northern Nigeria and Mali in the west to Somalia and Kenya in the east.

Sudan suffered a 22-year civil war that left more than a million people dead before the South became independent in 2011. The hope now is that South Sudan, with its warring, and shifting, ethnic factions, won't replicate that experience.