Not good. All three of the following were in the Washington Post today. As a bonus, at the end is a predictable NY Times editorial, blaming Bush.
Darfur sanctions needed after diplomacy fails: report – washingtonpost.com
Diplomacy over Darfur has failed and the international community must now consider sanctions against Sudan to pressure it into accepting U.N. peacekeepers, an influential thinktank said on Thursday.
"Patient diplomacy and trust in Khartoum’s good faith has been a patent failure," the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) said in a report published on Thursday.
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"The international community has little choice but to pursue an action plan based primarily on economic, legal and more limited military measures."
Darfur Refugees Live in Fear of Militias – washingtonpost.com
U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland this week warned that the Janjaweed were becoming even more dangerous because of new equipment they were apparently receiving from the Sudanese government.
The militias "are more brutal than ever," Egeland told reporters in Geneva. "The nightmare we are seeing in Darfur is continuing."
And then there’s this Washington Post editorial, about the U.N.’s new human Rights Council. Would you want your life to hang in the balance, dependent on the U.N.?
Reform Run Amok – washingtonpost.com
When the Human Rights Council was approved by the General Assembly in March, we were among the skeptics who doubted that it would be much of a change, mainly because the membership rules still allowed for the election of human rights violators. As it turned out, we were wrong: The council, which completed its second formal session last week in Geneva, has turned out to be far worse than its predecessor — not just a "shadow" but a travesty that the United Nations can ill afford. …
Western human rights groups sought to focus the council’s attention on Darfur, where genocide is occurring, and on Uzbekistan, where a dictator refuses to allow the investigation of a massacre by his security forces. Their efforts have been in vain. Instead, the council has treated itself to report after report on the alleged crimes of the Jewish state; in all, there were six official "rapporteurs" on that subject in the latest session alone. One, Jean Ziegler, is supposed to report on "the right to food." But he, too, delivered a diatribe on Israeli "crimes" in Lebanon.
The Age of Impunity – New York Times
President Bush has squandered so much of America’s moral authority — not to mention our military resources — that efforts to shame or bully the right behavior from adversaries (and allies) sound hollow.
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