IT IS WITH GREAT PRIDE THAT GERMANY CASTS ITS FIRST VETO FOR...

Blame the UN cheerleaders (Mark Steyn, The Australian, July 26th, 2004)

I see the next decade's "Never again" story is here. Just as we all agreed the 1994 Rwandan genocide should never be allowed to happen again, so - in a year or two - we'll all be agreed that another 2004 Sudanese genocide should never be allowed to happen again.

But right now it is happening, and you can't help wondering where all the great humanitarians are. Alas, Sudan doesn't seem to have much appeal to them, lacking as it does the crucial Bush angle and affording little opportunity for use of words such as "neocons" and "Halliburton".

In the Fairfax press, Robert Manne is still too busy fighting the last war - "Iraq is the greatest disaster in the recent history of US foreign policy. Nothing is more important than to try to understand how this catastrophe occurred." And if that means rehashing the same old column backwards and sideways for another two years - WMD, Andrew Wilkie, neocons, Cheney - he's prepared to do it.

There's an old, cynical formula for the prominence accorded different disasters by American editors. It runs something like: one dead American equals 10 dead Israelis equals 100 dead Russians equals 1000 dead Africans. But, to the average progressive columnist in the Western world, what matters is who killed you. 30,000 dead Sudanese don't equal one Iraqi prisoner being led around Abu Ghraib on a dog collar. But the minute the Yanks go in and accidentally blow up a schoolhouse, injuring an eight-year-old girl, the Mannes of the world will discover a sudden interest in Africa.

Manne's big gripe about Iraq seems to be that it was an "unnecessary, unlawful and unjust war". Each to his own. The Steyn Doctrine, such as it is, is that there's never a bad reason to take out a thug regime. Unfortunately for the beleaguered villagers of Darfur, the Americans so far are playing by Manne's rules. The USAF could target and bomb the Janjaweed as effectively as they did the Taliban.

But then the Not In Our Name crowd would get their knickers in a twist and everyone would complain that it's unlawful unless it's authorised by the UN. The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead.

No sane person watching the Sudan horrors unfold over the past few months could believe there is any widespread interest in saving these wretched people.