Darfur and the "International Community"

Nothing illustrates the illegitimacy and ineffectiveness of the "international community" better than the ongoing genocide in Darfur. Eric Reeves, writing in the New Republic, notes the latest outrage. He writes:

[T]here is no real international pressure on the architects of the genocide--the National Islamic Front security cabal in Khartoum--to bring the killing to a halt. On the contrary, as the genocide enters its fourth year, the international community continues to defer to Khartoum, or even to suggest disingenuously that the regime has somehow reformed itself. Either way, the clear implication is that the lives of Darfur's civilians are not worth the diplomatic price of confronting Sudan's brutal leaders.

There is no more appalling illustration of this phenomenon than recent announcements by the African Union and the Arab League that both groups will hold their upcoming summits in Khartoum. These summits will represent symbolic triumphs for Sudan's genocidaires. And they will reinforce in very public fashion what Khartoum already knows: that none of its neighbors really cares what it does in Darfur.

Read it here. [registration required]

The experience of the past half century has completely delegitimated the concept of "collective security" through super-governmental agencies, yet the idea lives on in many quarters simply because it is a convenient excuse for non-action. Worse, when confronted by atrocities such as those in Darfur or Zimbabwe, the "international community" actively conspires to inhibit or even preclude effective responses from individual nations or coalitions. We saw as much in Iraq. There is no longer any reason for a morally conscious person to give a damn what the EU, the Arab League, the AU, the UN, or any other such organization says or does.

A plague on all of them and those who would support such moral idiocy.