Liberals and Darfur

Mark Steyn is at his best in this piece concerning do-gooders George Clooney and Angelina Jolie who have finally discovered that horrors are being inflicted on Christians in Darfur:

What's the quintessential leftist cause? It's the one you see on a gazillion bumper stickers: Free Tibet. Every college in the US has a Free Tibet society: There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan Chapter. Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. Idealism asinertia is the hallmark of the movement.

Those of us on the Free Iraq-Free Darfur side are consistent: There are no bad reasons to clobber thug regimes, and the postmodern sovereignty beloved by the UN is strictly conditional. At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism. As Alexander Downer put it: "Outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism."

Just so. Regrettably, the Australian Foreign Minister isn't as big a star as Clooney, but I'm sure Downer wouldn't mind if Clooney wanted to appropriate it as the Clooney Doctrine. If Anglosphere action isn't multinational enough for Sudan, it might confirm the suspicion that the Left's conscience is now just some tedious shell game in which it frantically scrambles the thimbles but, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support.

People have been murdered and raped for years and now Clooney is worried? Steyn lays it all out; if people are serious about saving lives, it will come down to the US, Britain, Australia and Canada mounting a military mission. Does Clooney care enough about the people of Darfur to allow the US to do that? I highly doubt it.

I've been blogging about the genocide in Darfur since at least 2004, where the hell has Clooney been?

Of course, read the whole thing.

Update: The cease fire agreement is tenuous as an African Union rep is killed.