Anyone trying to understand the seeds of sectarian conflict in Iraq should read Nir Rosen’s response in the Washington Post to L. Paul Bremer’s Sunday op-ed. (As an aside, Rosen also had the cover of the New York Times Magazine this past weekend with his vividly detailed story of Iraqi refugees who—despite the 2 million who’ve fled the country and the 1.9 million internally displaced—have disappeared from our line of sight). Rosen’s primary strike against Bremer’s approach to Iraq is the unbelievable lack of knowledge-paired-with-hubris displayed in positing ourselves as savior to the Iraqi Shiites without beginning to understand the complex social and bureaucratic dynamics on the ground. And in likening Saddam’s Iraq to Nazi Germany, the oversimplified dichotomy that cast Sunnis as the aggressors and Shiites as the victims resulted in a series of colossal blunders and gave rise to the sectarian conflict we see today. But after reading Rosen's piece, I'm struck by how we are replaying this erroneous aggressor/victim construct in our national dialogue over Darfur.

Professor Mahmood Mamdani wrote an excellent and provocative piece in the London Review of Books a couple months ago criticizing the approach of activist groups like the Save Darfur campaign and writers like Nick Kristof, who oversimplify conflict in Darfur as genocide with a clear Arab aggressor against an African victim (not to mention their relative silence on violence in the Congo which has claimed the lives of four million).

Like in Iraq under Saddam and Iraq today today, there are much more complex dynamics at play in Darfur—class warfare, identity contestation, resource disputes, and political power—that we ought to pay heed to before naming it a genocide and going in, guns blazing, to intervene. After our failures to comprehend the intersecting social and ethnic identities and how they related to Saddam’s regime in Iraq which inadvertently set off a chain reaction of sectarianism, it would be prudent to at least begin to probe deeper into the issues of identity in Sudan before we expose ourselves to another strategic pitfall.

This is not to dissuade action on promoting peace in Darfur but to shed the hubris and oversimplified approach to managing conflict. The violence and death toll in Darfur is appalling and the U.S. should take a hands-on approach to leverage a ceasefire and eventually a peace deal. But as Mamdani points out, a UN commission argues it may be a leap to call it genocide when there are in fact elements of a civil war with an insurgency meting out civilian deaths as well, and by choosing sides without a firmer grasp of the fault-lines on the ground, we may even magnify the conflict.