Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Hotel Darfur

Paul Greenberg:

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke

Ever notice the huge U.N. emblem that dominates meetings of its General Assembly - a giant, schematic globe encircled by olive wreaths, the symbol of peace? It may be the most prominent ironic comment in contemporary architecture.

For in that same hall, delegates from every bloody tyranny in the world look on unmoved as one horror after another unfolds, and one act of aggression after another is solemnly ignored. Or even encouraged. For when the U.N. isn't ignoring threats to the peace, it's aiding and abetting them. Its impotence is exceeded only by its impudence. Not even the Senate of the United States, which includes the imitable Robert Byrd, can boast as many pompous gasbags.

The massacres in Darfur are only the latest blot on the U.N.'s record at protecting human rights, or even human life. That record has been worse than neutral, for the U.N. has actively sided with some of the worst human-rights abusers on the planet. The U.N.'s Commission on Human Rights is notorious for including in its membership the very regimes it should be condemning: China, Cuba, Sudan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya . . . . In a triumph of irony, Libya was chair of the committee one year.

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Nor would there be any shortage of subjects for future films, beginning with what is now happening in Darfur. Here is how a 29-year old military adviser to the African Union, a former Marine captain quoted in The New York Times, explains his mission there:

"Every single day you go out to see another burned village, and more dead bodies. And the children - you see 6-month-old babies that have been shot, and 3-year-old kids with their faces smashed in with rifle butts. And you just have to stand there and write your reports."

The captain has his orders. And the African Union has no troops, no equipment, and no international mandate to stop the slaughter. So it goes on, this bloody work of Sudan's bandit government in cahoots with Islamist militias determined to stamp out the infidel natives.

Multilateralism at work in Darfur everyday. It is really amazing that people still consider it a good thing.