Obama Urged to Play Peacemaker amid Africa 'Homecoming'

On the eve of a landmark visit to Africa, President Barack Obama is being implored to play peacemaker in war-ravaged South Sudan, rekindling a long-running dispute among White House aides.

An old Washington joke says that every new Senator looks in the mirror and sees a future president.

It might be true too that every second-term president looks in the mirror and sees a peacemaker.

With the electoral clock running down, White House occupants from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton have fancied themselves as fence menders extraordinaire. 

Obama -- even if emboldened by diplomatic victories with Iran and Cuba -- can have no such designs in the crisis-strewn Middle East. 

But a crescendo of voices, inside and outside the White House, want America's first black president to turn a statesman's gaze to Africa.

Particularly, to the renewed conflict in South Sudan that has killed 10,000 people since 2013 and displaced more than a million.

The nation, which U.S. cash and support midwifed into existence in 2011, has faltered badly in its infancy.

"Massive and widespread violence has returned" and human rights abuses are rampant, Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice said in an address marking the country's fourth birthday this month.

"It breaks my heart to see what South Sudan has become today," she said, using unusually emotive terms.

Many insiders describe the African-led peace process as broken, and the international response has been limited, with sanctions hitting only generals who have few if any assets abroad.

Most analysts agree that the two main protagonists, ethnic Dinka President Salva Kiir and his former vice president Riek Machar a Nuer, have little incentive to come to the negotiating table.

- 'Yes he can' - 

But advocates say a U.S. president born of a Kenyan father and who still has gravitas on the continent could use his political standing to curb the violence.

One diplomat who backs deeper U.S. engagement remembers early cabinet meetings in Juba, the capital of South Sudan, being punctuated by bursts of Obama's "Yes we can" campaign slogan, which several ministers had set as their iPhone ringtones. 

"He is that Messiah figure within the leadership of South Sudan," said the diplomat, who asked not to be named. "He has political leverage as a person more so than the United States as a country."

Ahead of Obama's trip to Kenya and Ethiopia those calls are growing louder.

Both countries are South Sudan's neighbors and both are part of regional mediation efforts that will now include the United States, Europe and China.

-- Nothing to lose -- 

"Obama should be pressuring regional allies," and put sanctions, an arms embargo and regional use of force, on the table, according to Casie Copeland of the International Crisis Group.

Some argue that even a personal moral plea from Obama to Kiir and Machar could be effective. 

"What have we got to lose?" asked one long-serving U.S. official. "President Obama can't go to East Africa and not talk about it." 

The State Department, led by John Kerry, U.N. ambassador Samantha Power and Sudan envoy Donald Booth, as well as some National Security Council staff, are said to be keen to see a bigger U.S. role.

But according to several sources familiar with deliberations within the White House, influential advisors, including chief of staff Denis McDonough, are skeptical.

"Some think this it is pretty radioactive and shouldn't be touched, there is nothing to gain, and if it is touched it shouldn't be embraced," said one source familiar with the debate.

Detractors believe that what happens in South Sudan, while abhorrent and worthy of response, does not affect U.S. national security directly enough to warrant a full court press, particularly with several other crises on the radar.

And even if the United States has a moral interest to act, it is not clear that acting would succeed.

Failure would damage Obama's political standing at home and abroad and deepen the conflict on the ground.

Rice is also said to be cautious, and according to critics, she is too unwilling to challenge regional allies, particularly Uganda, which supplies much-needed troops for the international force in Somalia. 

In a previous debate over U.S. backing for an arms embargo, the more reticent advisors had won out.  

But on the eve of Obama's visit, Rice suggested that a more engaged stance could now be in the offing.

When the U.S. president meets his African counterparts in Addis Ababa -- seat of the African Union -- leaders will look at how "to galvanize a peaceful outcome and to hold the leaders accountable on both sides," she said. 

"Should it prove impossible to get them to come to agreement, we will be talking about what other steps we might take collectively to impose consequences."

That may not be as dramatic as a Camp David summit or a White House handshake between historic enemies. 

But as one former Obama administration official said, it could be the genesis of something that "could give him an African legacy. At the moment he hasn't got one."