I spent Friday evening at Boston's Institute for Contemporary Arts. It was the setting for a gathering of people concerned about Darfur. Decent people, intelligent people, even some politicized people. There was an exhibit of 170 photographs of Darfur by eight photographers, both elementally touching and explosive. One of the photographers, my cherished friend Michal Ronnen Safdie, spoke and spoke softly but stirringly about the grievous misery inflicted on people innocent in the purest sense. We ran some of Michal's Darfur photos in both TNR and TNR online. Look at them--stark and in a way horribly beautiful--and see life ebb away, even if many of Khartoum's victims survive literally. But about 400,000 of them were killed in a genocide that we all know about. No one can say, "We did not know." Even the secretary general of the United Nations, past and present, let loose with the truth, although Kofi Annan prissily said it wasn't precisely "genocide." This is hair-splitting with many victims. Samatha Power, the author of Pulitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell, a TNR book, also spoke clearly, analytically and passionately. She identified the guilty: Sudanese Arabs and their allies in the Arab world. She identified the complicit: a grotesquely callous leadership throughout independent sub-Saharan Africa, indifferent to the point of being accomplices and handmaidens. And she identified the actual enablers: the Chinese government which is indifferent to the evils of any government so long as that government keeps Beijing's pipeline to oil open. For all of her criticism of George Bush, suggesting even that his good will on this matter may be irrelevant (an argument I do not buy), she asserted that no country in the U.N. has demonstrated its real concern on the Darfur issue other than our own. She is right. The aim is to end the killing. Samantha says 9,000 U.N.-African Union peacekeepers won't be able to do that. A very clear calculus. Also correct. Neither will 26,000 peacekeepers. In fact, the lessons of peacekeepers is that they don't end the killing. Look at Lebanon. The war in the former Yugoslavia, the war of the Serbs against the Muslims of Bosnia and of Kosovo did not end until the allies, with American leadership and broad European support, began to drop bombs on Belgrade. There is a failure of nerve here, a pathetic failure of nerve. The United Nations will get us nowhere. It cannot move; it is constitutionally crippled from moving. An editorial in Friday's Globe urges Ban Ki-moon and the Security Council to listen. Their listening will not help. Europe bears some responsibility for the awful detritus of colonialism. Let Great Britain and France lead the way to take armed responsibility for the peace of Darfur. There would be others: the Scandinavians, the Italians ... and, most important in a way, the Turks, who are Muslims and with an Islamicist government that is also a member of NATO. But we have to be clear: we want a war to impose peace. Otherwise, we are fooling ourselves just as our spokesmen are fooling us. YoYo Ma ended the evening with a celestial rendition of the fifth cello suite by Bach.