What makes you think George Bush is so inclined?  Has he just been biding his time all these years?

AlanSP -- I'm too lazy to find the Washington Post article I'm about to cite, but the article basically said that Bush really does care about Darfur, but he doesn't feel like he can doing anything about it. He's brought up the prospect of putting US forces in the region, but his advisers told him that it would be seen as just more illegal American presence in Muslim territory. What can he do, short of cut off diplomatic ties with China?

rozenson - laziness does not an argument make.

February 9, 2008

-- Lawmakers and human rights activists sharply criticized President Bush yesterday for issuing a signing statement that they said has undermined congressional efforts to pressure the Sudanese government to crack down on rebels responsible for the genocide in Darfur.

www.boston.com/.../bush_move_on_darfur_law_criticized

February 14, 2008

-- US President George W Bush has defended his decision not to send troops to the Sudanese region of Darfur, despite what he calls a genocide taking place there.

-- He called it a "seminal decision" not to intervene with force, taken partly out of the desire not to send US troops into another Muslim country.

news.bbc.co.uk/.../7245002.stm

Seminal indeed - George W. Bush confuses wankery with its consequence.

I'm frightened -- I'm in near complete agreement with Marty's post.  nd: this is a two-partner dance, Congress has happily tanked legislation with teeth on Darfur, but now that Bush is near the end of his term, he might shift course -- his father did something similar on Somalia at the end of his term.  And given how pathetic the candidates have been on Darfur (Marty, if you're honest you'll admit that Hillary Clinton, despite the Clintons shameful record on Rwanda and not in anyway comparable to Mia Farrow's efforts, was a little better on Darfur than Obama or McCain), focusing on the current administration isn't the worst plan.  

China and how it (de)values it's own people. Actually, China doesn't devalue its own people as much as it devalues other people. The anguish throughout China in light of the recent earthquake has been real and total, and a lot of the idiot contractors who built substandard schools will probably pay with their lives (if they didn't already die in the quake).

As I have said before, the Chinese are amenable to bribery, but with now $4.00 a gallon gas I even more doubt that Americans would tolerate any backroom deals guaranteeing China oil.

As to little private armies running around in Darfur. Impossible. Desert scrub, hit and run tactics, vast area. It is a useless idea.

Drop some smart bombs on Khartoum and the leaders headquarters, and then blame it on truck bomb terrorists. Deny, deny, deny we had anything to do with it. The leadership will get the message (those that survive)

Not a post on the ratching up of the pysch-ops Marty?

All the way to Greece? Where was the Greek radar? Was it even turned on?

I see the BBC has taken its cue. Big scare on prime time, ending with a mention/hint of the Pentagon report - that Iran doesn't have a nuclear programme. Trusty BBC,  preparing the ground for the strike nonetheless.

At least I'm long crude.

blackton -- Mark Halperin wrote pretty much the same thing in the NY Times a few months ago.  Hard to disagree.

Here Marty, a friend works as a school librarian and he's big into using comics to get the little toe- rags to read.

He's given a copy of 'Palestine', by Joe Sacco. He lived in the West Bank and Gaza during the first intifada, came home and wrote the comic .

It's an extrarodinary read, from the indignant Arabs everywhere grabbing him in the street, as he was a Westerner, ploughing him with tea and ranting about Israel at him. He also recounts his Israeli friend, from New York struggling to come to grips with the change.

Really fantastic read. Of course it's pro-Arba, anti pro...

Also, a copy of 'Berling, City of Stones', set in 20's Berlin amongst the swirling politics.

Comics are all right.

Marty, you mention the names of a number of countries here that you expect would follow George Bush's lead. My question is, why can't Great Britain, or France, or Sweden, or Denmark, or Germany take the lead? Why does it always have to be us, especially considering the thanks we get for our humanitarian interventions (such as Somalia)?

Isn't there is too much private funding of private militias? I suppose it makes sense to pay for security when it is for your own building, or a film shoot overseas, or a hospital in a remote area. Funding an offensive group, even if it would be chasing down murderers who torched the village of impoverished people, seems like a very poor idea. Khartoum occasionally pretends to disavow the Janjaweed so they might be open game. What would happen when the Blackwater fighters inflict collateral damage that included innocents, or politically, potentially worse, government forces that openly answered to Khartoum? At some point do these people tasked with preventing genocide start being called international terrorists and undermine their cause by making the conflict look like a civil war between more evenly matched forces.

Is this like the idea of using force to help the Burmese -- one that is very satisfying to think about, but ultimately a very bad idea.

The self-styled "world community"--a combine of supercilious diplomats, self-righteous NGOs