Dragging Out The Past While The Present Burns

The New York Times is running a story of the Sudanese pharmaceutical plant that was destroyed in a US airstrike during the Clinton Administration in 1998 following the twin terrorist attacks on US Embassies in Africa by al Qaeda. The plant was suspected of making chemical weapons, and tests have ranged from negative to inconclusive over whether the plant did anything other than make medications.

American officials have acknowledged over the years that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed. Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of Khartoum in the 1980's. But Washington still has not ruled out the possibility that El Shifa did, in fact, have some link to chemical weapons production.

So no apology has been made and no restitution offered, which has Sudan's government steaming, even seven years after the ground shook and the dark sky over Khartoum turned light as the plant was hit.

Sudan wants the US to say sorry.

I can't help but contain a hearty laugh for that.

After all, we're talking about the same Sudan whose government lets the janjaweed and Sudanese militias run amok and have killed more than 270,000 and displaced more than 2 million. And this is violence that has continued unabated.

This is the same country where civil war has killed more than 2 million over 20 years. Terrorists, including Osama bin Laden himself, called Sudan home. It was, and is, a safe haven for terrorists.

Sudan is a failed state, and the US did the prudent, if severely limited, thing in 1998 in going after the plant. So there's absolutely no reason to provide anything in the way of an apology for those actions.