Two days ago the US announced new sanctions against Sudan. John Ukec Lueth, Sudan's ambassador to the US, was immediately dispatched to make Sudan's case to the American people. It's not going well.

First, in a meeting with the American press yesterday, Lueth said that the sanctions were a "death sentence" for Sudan:

Ukec contended in a news conference that the sanctions would affect the supply and distribution of basic necessities and lead to more suffering.

"I don't think that the government officials — hundreds of them — will stop getting tea and sugar," he said. "It is just a death sentence to a large number of people."

He said that sanctions will hamper negotiations under way for peace in Darfur and other conflict regions in Sudan and could harm the stability of the country.

"Although the policy of the United States is to keep Sudan as one country, what it is doing is disintegrating Sudan," Ukec said.

So Lueth has publicly conceded that Sudan's government officials will continue to get luxuries while the people suffer. Smooth move. Perhaps more worrying for him is that his dire picture is completely at odds with the much sunnier one painted by an "unnamed Finance ministry official":

"It doesn't have that much effect on the economy. We don't have direct economic or trade relations with the United States," the Finance Ministry official told Reuters, asking not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

"Our economy is shifting from the USA and Europe to the East. We have almost 70 percent of our foreign trade with the East," he said, adding that the government conducts most of its financial transactions in euros.

The reason why this official has not been authorized to speak to the media is probably in order to prevent just this kind of thing from happening. Lueth is busy telling the world that the US is about to commit economic mass murder on his people, and this guy, with the imprimatur of the Finance Ministry, is saying, "no big deal". So, is he stupid? Or are there dueling agendas in the Sudanese government? Or have they just not got their story straight and distributed the talking points? You decide.

However, more worrying for Lueth was Dana Millbank's column in the Washington Post comparing him to "Baghdad Bob", former Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, who famously denied the Americans had entered Baghdad even as M1s were rolling through the streets behind him. Millbank, in reducing Lueth to caricature, writes:

Genocide in the Darfur region? "The United States is the only country saying that what is happening in Darfur is a genocide," Ukec shouted, gesticulating wildly and perspiring from his bald crown. "I think this is a pretext."

Ah. So what about the more than 400,000 dead? "See how many people are dying in Darfur: None," he said.

But most devastating was Lueth's own self-caricature, as he apparently attempted to hold the world's cola supply to ransom:

What's more, the good and peaceful leaders of Sudan were prepared to retaliate massively: They would cut off shipments of the emulsifier gum arabic, thereby depriving the world of cola.

"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola.

A reporter asked if Sudan was threatening to "stop the export of gum arabic and bring down the Western world."

"I can stop that gum arabic and all of us will have lost this," Khartoum Karl warned anew, beckoning to the Coke bottle. "But I don't want to go that way."

As diplomatic threats go, that one gets high points for creativity: Try to stop the killings in Darfur, and we'll take away your Coca-Cola.

This was so wacky that I had to hunt up some other news sources to make sure it wasn't actually satire. It wasn't:

Coke held hostage 

Arguably, Lueth has in fact identified one of the decadent west's weak spots (or sweet spots?). Nevertheless, as threats go its not in the same league as the OPEC oil embargo of the seventies.

Maybe Sudan should leave the public diplomacy to the altogether more disciplined and smooth Chinese.