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Eight years ago a newly elected American administration sent a special envoy to Sudan. Sen. John Danforth put aside several years of failed United States policy and "advocacy" toward Sudan, and accepted at face value Sudanese proposals to end the civil war in southern Sudan between the Sudan People's Liberation Movement and the Sudanese government.

Several years of American and European-brokered negotiations resulted in the signing of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), which ended Africa's longest-running conflict, established a coalition government and set a timetable for presidential and parliamentary elections and a landmark referendum on unity or separation for the south.

It was perhaps the Bush administration's only foreign policy success. Four years later...