Barack Obama was working diligently on trying to bring peace to the Sudan. Darfur had been the site of unbelieveable atrocities over the past six years; even George W. Bush had condemned the genocide in a speech to the United Nations less than years earlier. Millions had been killed; millions more had been displaced, living in refugee camps with little to eat and little future ahead of them. Villages had been systematically destroyed by marauding soldiers who would attack under cover of darkness, gang-rape the women and young girls, and massacre the men. Those who managed to escape had no village to come back to as government forces would burn virtually every house to the ground.
The world had paid scant attention to the Darfur incidents. To be sure, the United States had sent more than a half-a-billion dollars in aid, but throwing money at the problem didn't resolve anything. George W. Bush was reluctant to aggravate the Sudanese government leaders because of its ties to Osama binLaden, and the wicked despots took advantage of Bush's naive personna. Smarter than Bush could ever hope to be, they fed him little snippets of information about binLaden, enough to keep the money rolling in and keep the United States out of Darfur. Bush could have easily ordered troops to eradicate the Sudan dictatorship, but - apparently - saw no reason to do so. After all, there was very little oil in Darfur.
What oil was in the Sudan was difficult to access, and was already committed to other nations by long-standing treaties with the Sudanese government. Besides, Bush's family had no personal grudge against the leaders of the Sudanese government (as they did with the leader of the Iraqi government). So, Bush saw no moral justification in trying to save the lives of millions of Darfur refugees. In his mind, they were just a bunch of poor black folks who lived in a desert. Of what possible use could they be to his administration? So the genocide had continued, unabated and unchallenged by the world's greatest defender of peace and freedom.
Now, Obama had made it his personal mission to end the tragic circumstances in the Sudan. Interim President Colin Powell, s Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military forces, ordered troops to Darfur. The civil war in Iraq was out of control anyway; the war in Iran had not peaked yet, and Powell took under advisement the recommendations of his military's top brass. As they had tried to warn Geroge W. Bush for almost three years, the war in Iraq was unwinnable. It was time to deploy military forces where they could actually do some good in the world. Troops were on the way; genocide in Darfur would come to an abrupt end - soon.