Darfur II

Last week I looked down on Darfur from Google Earth. Today I saw some remarkable pictures of the real effect of those blackened specks.

The first good news in a long while is that the UN has been invited in. It's only 3,000 troops - which is less than half the existing African Union deployment - but it shows the international community seems to be taking this war seriously. Or at least shows they've noticed it at all.

In fact "war" is hardly the word. It reminds me strongly of the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein in gassing the Kurds. Or ... no, stoppit.

I'm very aware of Godwin's law : which states that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." and that overuse of the Nazi/Hitler comparison should be avoided, as it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.

But to me the only thing that's stopping the Sudanese government and the Janjaweed from being a 21st century version, is a lack of modern weaponry.

We in the West built the Iraqi war-machine as an antidote to fundamentalist Iran, and the weaponry was used to a shameful degree against a minority of Iraqis.

I'm sure it's more by luck than by judgement that the Sudanese weren't equally endowed.