Stop the Mass Murder in Darfur
Kristof, Mercenaries, and the Genocide Intervention Fund

Nicholas Kristof again tries to redirect our national attention to the catastrophe occuring in the Sudan. One might see this as a particularly high opportunity cost of the war in Iraq, though it is, of course, unlikely that we would have done anything to stop the Darfur tragedy anyway. Conservatives have repeated the litany of Saddam's sins ad nauseam, but it's clear that this is merely a post hoc attempt to justify a war undertaken for (allegedly) prudential reasons. (They were, you'll recall, all for Saddam when his atrocities were more-or-less in our national interest.) Even if we weren't overstretched in Iraq, we'd still be sitting on the sidelines in the Sudan. Well, too bad we're not just sitting on the sidelines, actually, instead of making things worse...

Last year I suggested that liberals should start thinking about funding mercenaries to defend the innocent in the Sudan. Although some liberals howled about this suggestions (I've since switched comments from Haloscan to Blogger, so the howls are gone), I stick by it, and, as I've noted, such solutions have worked in the past.

Now there's a group at Swarthmore, the Genocide Intervention Fund (GIF), that seeks to take similar action by sponsoring African peacekeepers already in the Sudan. As far as I can tell, they don't use money to purchase weapons, in part because the people who are likely to contribute to such an organization--liberals--are often irrationally averse to the use of force. (At any rate, that's one of the reasons suggested by this piece in the Sudan Tribune.)

Even if we stick with the GIF approach of not paying for weapons, we could supply the troops with enough other supplies that it would free up money in the AU to purchase more weapons for the peacekeepers. This may be a better idea than funding mercenaries--it's at least more practicable. On the other hand, mercenaries, like those of Executive Outcomes that brought order to Sierra Leone, are probably more reliable and less likely to do damage of their own than troops from, e.g., Nigeria which make up much of the AU force, and which have a history of abuses on peacekeeping missions (in, e.g., Liberia and Sierra Leone).

But whatever the solution, any even minimally rational and humane person must acknowledge that something must be done in the Sudan. We simply cannot stand by and do nothing.