THE PLOT THICKENS
Lest anyone think the Sudan crisis is simple (government bad, blacks good, US-UN should intervene, save lives, stop genocide) The Economist provides a useful reminder of complexity. First, the rebels are not blameless:

The peace talks between the Khartoum government and Darfur’s main rebel groups broke up last week after the rebels accused the government of breaching a ceasefire agreed earlier this year. International observers worry that the rebels are being deliberately intransigent, in the hope that the dire humanitarian crisis will force the world powers to send troops to the region. It seems clear that unless the rebels come back to the negotiating table and both sides honour the ceasefire, the job of restraining the janjaweed will be much harder.

People respond to incentives. Never forget the law of unintended consequences. Meanwhile, a humanitarian crisis is underway in neighboring Uganda too:

This in turn might lead the Sudanese government to renew its support for the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a bizarre cross between a religious cult and a rebel movement based across the border in northern Uganda, which abducts children and makes them attack Ugandan government forces and civilians. There are already signs of this happening: on Tuesday, church leaders and southern Sudanese rebels said at least 40 civilians had been killed as the rebels fought to regain a village that the LRA had captured, allegedly with the help of Sudanese government forces. In Uganda itself, perhaps 1.8m have fled from the LRA. The resulting humanitarian crisis merits perhaps as much international concern as is now beginning to be expressed over the plight of the Darfuris.

In Africa, most of the population is children. Children are sometimes called "innocent." I would say rather that their behavior is less regulated, less fixed by experience into steady, predictable channels: they can be more generous, more frank, more good-hearted, more wonderful but also more violent and superstitious, more prone to evil influences. Africa is a world at subsistence level, like the European Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages are in some respects a Westerner's best cultural lens on Africa: hunger, illiteracy, and superstitious religion make people on-edge; fealty and vassalage and the cult of hot-headed courage have their place; a weapon turns a nobody into a somebody. In such a context, not only our actions and inactions but our threats and our deliberations create a ripple effect, and are victims of a much-amplified law of unintended consequences.

I wonder if the US is fated (ironically) to misunderstand the world comprehensively precisely because our influence in it is so great, and it is so difficult to be impartial about oneself and one's own works.