Demagogue

Kofi Annan and Hillary Clinton are urging NATO to get involved in Darfur, mostly by providing logistical support to the AU. Sudan is rejecting the idea - and so is France, apparently. This is mostly pointless: the trouble in Darfur is not going to be stopped by some 4,000 AU troops without a mandate to intervene (as it stands now, there are less then half the allotted number of troops on the ground.) The problem is not so much getting troops to Darfur, but getting troops for Darfur. Romeo Dallaire estimates that they would need 44,000 to do the job properly. NATO logistical, technological and transportation assistance isn't going to do anything other than add a few thousand more powerless troops to the region where they can watch the slaughter continue.

Voice of America, in its piece "Should International Criminal Court Have Jurisdiction Over Darfur Atrocities" talks to Samantha Power, who favors the court, and Jeremy Rabkin, who doesn't. While I favor the court and disagree with Rabkin's view that the ICC is just some way for Europe to challenge US hegemony, I have to agree with this

However, Jeremy Rabkin, Cornell University, professor of government, strongly disagrees. He says those pressing for ICC involvement in Darfur "have their priorities backwards."

He says, "The idea that we are boxed in because we used one word rather than another word, it's just silly. What is it that people in Europe really want to happen in the Sudan? And I'm sure that they'd like the killing to stop. But what's their priority? And if you say that their priority is seeing that justice is done, it's a lie. It's just silly. Of course that's not their priority. If that were their priority, their first thing in justice is to make sure nobody else is killed. And to do that, you'd have to have either troop deployment or intervention, which is out of the question for them. They don't even want to think about it."

Eric Reeves offers his latest "Darfur Humanitarian Update" in which he reports that some 3 million people are now dependent on aid organizations for food and that, in a compromise stemming from slightly different calculations from Jan Coebergh, an estimated 340,000 people have died. Basically, there are two people in the entire world who seem to be trying to get an accurate picture of how many people have died in Darfur: Reeves and Coebergh, both of whom are layman. What does that say about the UN, the NGOs and the rest of the international community?