(RightWing.org) – “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is believed to have been first said by a philosopher in the fourth century BC, but has since become commonplace. But what happens when that mutual enemy is no longer there? The war that has erupted in the East African nation of Sudan seems to be giving the world first-hand experience to answer that question, and many countries, including the United States, are using military forces to pull their diplomats and their families out of the region.
Spec Ops to the Rescue
An April 22 press release from the White House announced that President Joe Biden had authorized the military to undertake “an operation to extract U.S. government personnel from Khartoum [Sudan’s capital].” Media reports say that Navy SEAL Team Six (the same unit that took out Osama bin Laden), an elite Airborne unit of the Army, along with Special Operation helicopter pilots and Air Force personnel took part in the rescue.
Biden expressed his gratitude to the men and women who undertook this mission and acknowledged the help of the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Saudi Arabia, who provided the embassy staff with places to go during the evacuation.
What About Other Americans
While the diplomatic mission and those associated with it were all brought out safely, there are a reported 16,000 American civilians who have been essentially left to fend for themselves in the middle of a war zone.
The United States State Department website advisory for Sudan is “Level 4: Do Not Travel” due to “armed conflict, crime, such as kidnapping, armed robbery, home invasion, and carjacking.” A former American diplomat who served under President Barack Obama by the name of Brett Bruen wrote an op-ed for the Daily Mail with the headline declaring the partial evacuation “… a bloody disgrace! Biden maroons 16,000 Americans…,” while Spain and Saudi Arabia got everyone out.
Bruen recalled his experiences in 2004 when he was with the group that took Americans and Canadians to safety in the midst of a civil war in the Ivory Coast and of being in the White House Situation Room when Marines landed during the 2013 fighting in South Sudan. In his opinion, “the abandonment of Americans in Sudan is part of a problematic pattern” by Joe Biden, likening it to the bungled 2021 pullout of Kabul, Afghanistan when he left so many behind in the clutches of the Taliban.
The recent fighting in Sudan comes after current President General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who controls the country’s military, and Vice President General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (a.k.a. Hemedti) runs the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), broke what has been described as “a tenuous power-sharing agreement.” They had agreed to that in an effort to continue Sudan’s transition from a dictatorship to a democracy after they had joined together in a military coup to overthrow the previous transitional government in 2021.
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