"A former Marine, I had arrived in Sudan's Darfur region in September 2004 as one of three U.S. military observers for the African Union, armed only with a pen, pad and camera. The mandate for the A.U. force allowed merely for the reporting of violations of a cease-fire that had been declared last April and the protection of observers. The observers sometimes joked morbidly that our mission was to search endlessly for the cease-fire we constantly failed to find. I soon realized that this was no joke." Brian Steidle

See the children with their backs torn open by bullets. See the villages torched and strafed by government gunships. See the refugees crammed into camps, parched and starving. A few minutes of this is enough to make one scream for someone, anyone, anyone at all to just do something.

The UN Security Council could, in theory, put in an expanded civilian protection force into Darfur, possibly deploying peacekeepers from other African and Muslim countries. But China—which imports six percent of its oil from Sudan, and has a controlling stake in various Sudanese oil companies—would likely veto any such intervention. Likewise, NATO could step in, but for the fact that France has opposed such a move, arguing that the organization should not be "the gendarme of the world." And other Arab countries have also declined to get involved; Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, for instance, has denounced any possible "internationalization" of the conflict.

For its part, the Bush administration no longer seems willing to put pressure on its allies over Darfur; over the past few weeks the State Department has shied away from calling the situation a "genocide," a word that Colin Powell had been hurling around with authority last year. More recently, Mark Leon Goldberg of the American Prospect reported that the White House was trying to thwart the Darfur Accountability Act from passing Congress, an act which would accelerate AU deployment, authorize an expansion of the UN peacekeeping force, slap sanctions on Khartoum, and use international airpower to enforce a no-fly zone over Darfur and prevent Sudanese gunships from strafing villages. One possible explanation for the shift: The Los Angeles Times' Ken Silverstein reported last week that the U.S. appears to be gaining valuable counterterrorism support from, among other things, Sudan's intelligence chief Salan Abdallah Gosh, who happens to be overseeing the genocidal war against Darfur.