Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Countdown to Genocide in Dafur

Krauss and Pharn offer this update on the situation in Dafur. Sadly, they can only offer pessimism and a message to all those who still cling to the belief that the UN offers a viable option for securing any meaningful peace when intervening in situations of great oppression:
Even in Sudan the UN appears helpless before a relatively weak, lawless country whose Islamist leadership seems intent on massacring hundreds of thousands of its citizens. Do we sense a pattern here?
Churchill's take on appeasement was: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last'. I keep getting a visualization for a Far Side style cartoon expressing my view of the UN, which would involve a bunch of fat cats laying around a single tree on the savannah, trying to decide whose turn it is to get up and feed the crocodile today.

UPDATE: It seems Dafur has again been discovered by well-meaning do-gooders in the west, which O'Neill suggests is not necessarily a good thing.