"The US policy in the region is like it is everywhere else – incoherent," Giraldi said on Thursday. "The reality is that the United States has no real interest in Sudan, north and south."
Giraldi noted that Rice and Power had built their careers in US policymaking by denouncing alleged genocidal activities by the government of Sudan based in Khartoum. Eventually South Sudan, with strong US backing was established as an independent country in 2011.
"The US interest is that two leading foreign policy intellectuals named Power and Rice who work for the community organizer in chief made their name by denouncing genocide in Sudan, leading to the partition of the country," he recalled.
However, the tribal groupings of Southern Sudan had never been a coherent, united nation or minority in their collective history and the country had suffered from chaos and failure to establish any credible state structure in the five years since it had been created, Giraldi pointed out.
"The only problem is that the south is a fake country that has been fighting itself since and it has gotten progressively worse as time goes on, resulting in the mess that is currently on display," he explained.
Because Coca-Cola had political influence in Washington and still needed supplies of gum arabic from Sudan to make its world-famous brand soft drink, the Khartoum government had been allowed to continue export it, despite US-inspired sanctions in other areas, Giraldi observed.
"Gum arabic is produced in the north and is used in making Coca-Cola. That is why even though Khartoum is under punitive sanctions across the board for crimes against humanity it can still sell its gum arabic. I believe several ex-congressmen have investments in the trade," he added.
US Agency for International Development (USAID) chief Gayle Smith and two other US officials will hold talks in Rwanda over the weekend to discuss the crisis in neighboring South Sudan, the Department of State said in an advisory note on Thursday.
