Darfur II

Four months ago, I mentioned the pathetic nature of the liberal response to Darfur. Now, in an article at the American Spectator, James Bowman has made the same point far more articulately than I did:

Near the end of Ted Braun's documentary, Darfur Now, a student from Los Angeles named Adam Sterling is invited to speak at the ceremonial signing in Sacramento of a measure he has helped to push through the California legislature. It instructs California state pension funds managers to sell any stock they have in companies doing business in the Sudan. "To the government of Sudan," says young Adam as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger beams down at him approvingly. "We're coming! Your genocide will not occur on our watch, and it will not occur on our dime!" Now I suppose that disinvestment by the state employees of California -- and other states -- in Sudanese oil is not quite so feeble a gesture as the petition addressed to the Taliban I was once asked to sign, pre-9/11, protesting against their treatment of women in Afghanistan, but it is not far off it.

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The saddest thing in this sad film is the shots of the people of Darfur as they wait for Western assistance, imagining what it will be like when "the white people" come to deliver them from their miseries, to set up hospitals and dig wells and bring electricity. They are frankly nostalgic for the days of empire. What Adam Sterling is really doing with his ostentatious display of compassion is helping to make sure that that will never happen. One of the refugee children interviewed for Mr. Braun's camera says: "I want to be a pilot. When I am a pilot I will fly to America and buy many weapons." And then, speaking of the Janjaweed, he adds: "Like they burned us, I want to burn them." Now there's someone who might get something done.

Darfur

About a month ago, I attended a friend's son's bar mitzvah. Apparently, the latest trend is for the celebrant to ask the guests to make donations to a specified charitable cause rather than buy him a gift. This celebrant asked invitees to donate to a save Darfur organization.

After inspecting the organization's website, I gave the requested donation, on the theory that it would probably do no harm. But what really struck me was how utterly useless the organization appeared to be. From what I could tell, the organization's only idea was to raise "awareness" about how terrible things were happening in Darfur, and insist that someone do something. Unfortunately, it wasn't clear who that someone was, and it wasn't clear what it was that it or they should be doing. To the extent the website gingerly mentioned the possibility of peacekeeping forces or no-fly zones, the suggestion seemed to be that they would be undertaken by UN or other international organizations.

All of which got me thinking about Rwanda. I think it was Philip Gourevitch in his excellent and gut-wrenching book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, who pointed out that, if the U.S. had used a single cruise missile or bomb to take out the Rwandan national radio station, that act would likely have saved hundreds of thousands of lives, because the mass murderers were using the radio station to direct the killing squads where to go.

So, too, in Darfur: everyone knows perfectly well that the Sudanese government is behind the Janjaweed killers. A surprise cruise missile attack or bombing sortie on the Sudanese government offices in Khartoum would reduce the mass murder in Darfur immediately. And yet the Save Darfur organizations, such as the one whose web site I viewed, cannot bring themselves to demand the one action that everyone knows would be the most efficacious.

Why? They will have to look into their own hearts, but my guess is the usual mix: hatred of Bush and of the US military make it impossible for them even to conceive of the use of force except, possibly, by corrupt international organizations that will never act.

Pathetic.