NYT Editorial: UN Is Useless

All it took was yet another genocide for the dime to drop:

After the Holocaust, the world vowed it wouldn't stand back and allow genocide to happen again. Bosnia, Cambodia and Rwanda showed how empty that promise was. Darfur was yet another reminder that when it comes to standing up to stop the slaughter of entire peoples, the nations of the world remain pitifully inadequate.

And now, as if the hundreds of thousands of Africans killed in Sudan weren't enough, the Arab militias financed by the government of Sudan to "cleanse" Darfur of blacks are moving across the border into neighboring Chad. Our colleague Nicholas Kristof reports that the janjaweed — the name given to the Arab militias — have unleashed their fury on villages in Chad, riding in and killing and raping, accompanied by their standard shouting of racial epithets like "black slaves."

...

Is this really what we have come to? The United Nations has described the carnage in Darfur as the world's biggest humanitarian crisis but continues to prove itself completely useless at doing anything to stop it. In the Security Council, China protects Sudan. Europe, for its part, has been inert.

And what's this? The United States is actually on the right side of things?

That leaves the United States, where the Bush administration has made a few strides. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick appears to be close to getting the United Nations to supplement, if not replace, the woefully ineffective African Union peacekeeping force in the region with United Nations peacekeepers.

Why, you'd almost think the UN was a dysfunctional organization existing mainly to protect the client-tyrants of Russian and China or something.

I wonder what those black Sudanese did to anger the Arab extremists. Maybe it was all their support of Israel. That's my hunch.

As usual, the New York Times only seems to rouse itself from its slumbers when non-Americans are being attacked. It's laudable to want to protect non-Americans. I just wish maybe they'd have had a similar reaction when Americans are slaughtered.

Thanks to Allah, who got it from Beltway Blitz.

posted by Ace at 12:00 PM

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