The New Republic

I know that some readers get annoyed when I come back (again and again) to
Darfur. They do not want to accept the by now banal fact that the
international system will not respond realistically to the Sudanese
genocide in Darfur, the Arab genocide of blacks..

But it's nonetheless agreeable to report that the new president of France,
Nicolas Sarkozy, and the new prime minister of Great Britain, Gordon Brown,
have together announced that they will pressure the United Nations to send
peacekeepers to the Sudan. Real peacekeepers, which finally may mean "no
fly zones" and direct action against Khartoum. Let's face it: the African
Union is simply a joke. It is certainly that when it is alone. It has
neither the will nor the capacity to affect anything. And,of course, the
UN has its own intrinsic liabilities, the chief of which is that China is a
permanent member of the Security Council.

Still, Brown is, in this matter, actually an improvement over even Tony
Blair. And Sarkozy, well, how could he not be an improvement--a great
improvement--over Jacques Chirac, who had cynically put France on the wrong
side of almost every issue?

By the way, the aggression by Sudan has now slipped over not only to Chad,
old news, but to the Central African Republic, as well.

There's an AP dispatch detailing all of this.

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