Can you do anything? No? Then STFU.

Simon Jenkins, writing in the Guardian, gets the "heartless contrarian award" for the day, writing about Darfur:

To call the conflict genocide is wrong, unless the word now covers any ethnic war. This is a separatist struggle in which land, religion, clan and mere survival brought people into contention; in which tens of thousands died and from which hundreds of thousands fled. We can sympathise, but what is the point of telling such peoples to stop squabbling and behave? How would we react if they lectured us on Northern Ireland?...

If Sierra Leone, why not Somalia? If East Timor, why not Aceh? Why so tolerant of that nuclear host to terror, dictatorial Pakistan, and so hysterical about semi-democratic Iran? It is no good muttering that we cannot be everywhere. We can at least talk the talk. Kant's moral imperative must be universalisable or it loses all force as both a rule and a deterrent....

The swelling chorus of something-must-be-done-in-Darfur argues that bombast "raises awareness". They ask, what would I do about the janjaweed, and what about the 1.9 million refugees? My answer to the first is identical in substance to theirs: nothing really. They just get the T-shirt. The janjaweed are not in my country, not my business and, most important, not a problem within my power to solve.

It's worth remembering that while we call it genocide, Jenkins is right - Darfur has many of the marks of what's going on in Iraq right now. (Calm down, wingnuts: I'm talking about sectarian violence, not the Americans.) One is being called genocide, the other is conspicuously not. Meanwhile, even when we call it genocide, that's pretty much where we limit our actions - hollering from the sidelines. Nevermind that as signatories to the Convention Against Genocide, the United States is required - with or without the UN - to prevent or end genocide where it sees it. As a rhetorical device, it's useful for Bush. As an effective strategy, rhetorical devices generally suck.