Have you managed to hear the strange sound of silence from those who would normally have been crying for "the West" - i.e., the USA - to intervene in Sudan? Oh, how their toes itch in frustration that they cannot even whisper what they yearn to bawl, writes Kevin Myers
Yet how can they call for action by the only country capable of asserting its power against a murderous tyranny when they were so opposed to ending an even worse tyranny in Iraq? To be sure, this has not been a happy period for those few of us who dissented from the overwhelming majority of opinion in this country and supported the US-led assault on the most evil regime in the world (bar that in North Korea). We know now that US and British intelligence played fast and loose with the facts about weapons of mass destruction, in order to create the pretext for war: an outrageous, inexcusable combination of ineptitude and intellectual dishonesty.
I believed the canards about WMD: but who before the war argued in the UN that Saddam had destroyed his weapons? The French certainly didn't, and they're the ones who made UN support for military action impossible by their promise of an unconditional veto. Moreover, like almost everyone else who supported the war, my justification of the US-led assault was not confined to the future threat posed by Iraq, but its past deeds. Saddam's regime had been responsible for the deaths of at least two million people; it had lobbed ballistic missiles into most of its neighbours; it had gassed thousands of civilians to death; it had "disappeared" uncountable numbers of its own citizens. It had. . .oh, Christ, you know the rest.
So if you do, how do you justify continuing inaction? All right, you win the WMD argument. But what about our other arguments? Here was a regime of spectacular foulness, without equal this side of the east-west hemispheric divide since Hitler, and matched only by Pol Pot and Mao on the other side of the divide in that same period.
Saddam had blithely ignored countless UN resolutions. Sanctions, with the consequent oil-for-food programme, far from hurting him, had made him rich. He bribed UN officials monitoring the food-for-oil programme with oil-vouchers worth millions of dollars. Without military action, sanctions were the only weapon the UN possessed to oppose his regime. Yet sanctions, thus manipulated, brought great suffering to the Iraqi people, meanwhile making him, and his vile sons, astoundingly rich, not to speak of turning a few UN officials into millionaires.
So how many more hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were going to have to die while this farce continued? Enough was enough. And those who opposed the war, root and branch, must really propose an alternative method for dealing with Saddam. Doing nothing whatever would have meant that repeated votes about anything in the UN were worthless, thereby serving as a reassurance of international inactivity to every would-be tyrant who fancies mass murder as occupational therapy.
Sudan proves the point: here is an utterly evil regime which is presiding over genocide. To be sure, because it is oil-free and presents no military danger to its neighbours, it is a less compelling case than Iraq's: but these things are merely relative. Is there an argument in favour of the UN authorising military intervention? Yes. But how can it even contemplate that after refusing to authorise action against the greater and more flagrant evil of Iraq? So the Janjaweed, the Arab Cossacks, rape and murder their way across Darfur, propelling hundreds of thousands of black Africans into the miserable pot-hole that is Chad. Poor, defenceless Chad. It's the kid in the playground that won't get picked by either side. It's not a state or a country: it's the bits of Africa no one else wants, all bundled up together. And now it's got up to 200,000 refugees from Sunny Sudan pouring across its borders. Most of them are women and children: and the women have usually been raped. Where are the men? Oh dead, probably.
Had Afrikaners been responsible for this holocaust, there would have been a world outcry. Instead, amid the embarrassed shuffling of shoes, there is a baffled silence - for of course, the authors of this jihad have a double indemnity: Sudan is a member of both the African Union and the Arab League. This is like belonging to the LVF and the INLA. Not merely do you get to hang around with two sets of unspeakable villains, but they'll take your side in any dispute.
So realistically, we know that any attempt by the UN to authorise intervention to end the genocide in Sudan would both validate the US's invasion of Iraq and equally, be opposed by those splendid fellows in the African Union and the Arab League.
However, that said, nothing can mitigate the staggering US failure to prepare properly for post-war Iraq. That the allies were utterly unable to equip the new police with weapons or body-armour was, quite simply, criminally irresponsible. Moreover, reckless American gunfire, especially the shooting of unarmed ex-soldiers demanding pay at Fallujah a year ago, added fuel to a gathering inferno. But most inexcusable of all was the regime of torture and sexual abuse in Abu Ghraib. And this was absolutely not the spontaneous creation of a few hill-billies (and those charming hill-jillies), but was, in general tenor if not in detail, the result of a jail-policy of terror. And this policy, in turn, was ultimately authorised by no less than US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself.