The UN Kills

The coalition of Clooney on Darfur includes luminaries of the left and our own Democrat congressional delegation led by Sen. Barack Obama and Rep. Jan Schakowsky. Some of us might be so gauche as to ask, where have they been? Here's my earlier post, "Tears of Darfur".

Since Clooney's taken up the cause, it's gotten more visibility, so can we look forward now to bipartisan support for US military intervention? Mark Steyn in The Australian:

The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does? He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff such as: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."

Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.

Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.

Too little, too late.

The see-no-evil-unless-it-directly-affects-my-comfort left strikes out again. Not enough imagination, not enough compassion, not enough moral courage on the left.

UPDATE: UN envoy, journalists and aid workers flee angry mob in Darfur. CNN