Another really excellent Washington Post editorial on Darfur -- 'Realism' and Darfur. It ends with this powerful statement: "Perhaps there are other arguments for 'caution' in the face of Darfur's genocide, and we invite President Bush and other leaders to come forward and explain them. According to officials at the U.S. Agency for International Development, up to 30,000 people in Darfur have died violently, 50,000 have died of disease and malnutrition, and the death toll is likely to reach at least 300,000. The reasons for non-intervention had better be as powerful as those astonishing numbers."

Having just visited the Holocaust museum in Washington makes me remember the pathetic lack of response to the plight of European Jews before and during WWII -- the voyage of the St. Louis, for example, with over 900 Jewish refugees, which sailed to Cuba, only to be turned back there, and which was refused entry into the U.S. as well, or the Evian conference, in which virtually no countries offered to take in German Jewish refugees. We have all these bad examples of inaction before us -- why do we have to replicate them today?