Unlearning Lessons

From the editors of the New Republic:

Never again? What nonsense. Again and again is more like it. In Darfur, we are witnessing a genocide again, and again we are witnessing ourselves witnessing it and doing nothing to stop it. Even people who wish to know about the problem do not wish to know about the solution. They prefer the raising of consciousnesses to the raising of troops. Just as Rwanda made a bleak mockery of the lessons of Bosnia, Darfur is making a bleak mockery of the lessons of Rwanda. Some lessons, it seems, are gladly and regularly unlearned. Except, of course, by the perpetrators of this evil, who learn the only really enduring lessons about genocide in our time: that the Western response to it is late in coming, or is not coming at all.

The Western response? Is it really up to the West to intervene? The answer, sadly, is….well, no one else is going to do anything about it. But the last time the West intervened to stop a genocidal regime – one which, quite apart from the massacres of Kurds and Marsh Arabs, had invaded two of its neighbours, was in breach of numerous UN resolutions, and whose leader Saddam Hussein made no secret of his ambition to acquire WMDs to further his ambition to be the new Saladin – the protests across the world, and most particularly in the West itself, were so deafening, and the vitriol hurled at Bush and Blair so relentless, that the chances of another intervention by the West – ie the US with its allies – is effectively zero. America marching in to another Muslim oil-producing country? Yeah, right.

So, everyone will go on pretending that the regime in Khartoum is part of the solution instead of part of the problem, and negotiations will continue, and the genocide will work itself through, and the conflict will very likely spread to Chad – has already spread to Chad – and we’ll continue to read articles like this one…..