The New York Times did one of its regular and dutiful and lapidarian editorials this week on how the United Nations Security Council needs to persuade China to put pressure on Sudan to ease the torment of Darfur How long will it take the Times and other organs of high-minded goodwill to grasp that the Security Council will not pressure China to pressure Sudan...etc? If this reflexive and utterly irrelevant editorializing were not about mass murder this habit would simply be a joke. It isn't, of course, and the Times as an institution must get itself all pumped up for and by its empty virtue in this matter. Does anybody really think that, even without this oil market, China would trouble Sudan to do anything. (We have learned a lot in the last weeks about China and how it (de)values it's own people. Why should it care a fig about the black Muslims in Darfur? And don't forget: what Khartoum does is basically the policy of the Arab League whose members also sell oil.)
One of the real heroes of the "save Darfur" movement is Mia Farrow (another is our own Eric Reeves) who works without stop to get someone, anyone to stop the relentless assaults on innocent and specially designated people. This is genocide. According to today's FT, Farrow has actually asked Blackwater to help. Some of you may smirk. But private security is better than no security at all for the Darfurians.
The best way to end the massacres of Africans is for a sizable (but not enormous) and armed soldiery with airplanes to take on the mission, not so much of rescue from this atrocity here and that atrocity there but of systematic interposition between the murderers and their designated victims.
Who will initiate this? I believe that George Bush is so inclined. He would need John McCain and Barack Obama to back him. There are plenty of other countries that would follow our lead:Great Britain, Canada, Italy, France, Germany, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Australia, at least two of the Scandinavians, Holland, Belgium, maybe even Muslim Turkey. Oh, I know, you want this initiated by South Africa and Nigeria. Fat chance.