If you want to know just how well the left’s strategy of using criminal laws and international institutions to fight Islamism, look no farther than the world’s shameful inaction in the Sudan.
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Good news from Sudan:

After resisting for months, Sudan has agreed to a joint United Nations and African Union force of nearly 20,000 peacekeepers in Darfur, its western province and the site of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the African Union said Tuesday.

Of course, there is a ‘but’:

African Union officials hailed the announcement as a breakthrough, but others cautioned that the Sudanese government had made similar pledges only to reverse itself. Sudan has also set conditions for the deployment, including an insistence that a majority of the soldiers be African and that non-Africans be used only as a last resort, which may hamper efforts to raise the force to full strength.

The NYT’s Lydia Polgreen and Warren Hoge are still of the opinion, however, that the agreement offered “the clearest hope yet that an enlarged and strengthened peacekeeping force would be deployed in Darfur, where the conflict pitting the government and its allied militias against rebel groups has driven 2.5 million people from their homes and killed at least 200,000.”

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to the UN: “If this is an unconditional acceptance, this would be a positive step that we would welcome, but if it is conditional, as we hear, that there will be only African troops involved and no non-Africans, that is putting a condition on the acceptance, and that would be unacceptable.”

John Prendergast, a Sudan expert who helps lead Enough Project shares Khalilzad’s concerns: “The gulf between the rhetoric of acceptance and the reality of deployment is huge,” he said, adding that haggling over the composition of the force “is putting a condition on the deployment which ensures its failure.”

This is taking far too long as it is. I am starting to believe that the international community should not ask Sudan for permission at all. Just strive to organize a sizeable force and go in. The people of Darfur have to be protected, against militias and, first and foremost, against the central government.

It is the Sudanese government that is responsible for a lot of the violence, and a lot of the deaths. I do not quite see why the international community needs Sudan’s permission to stop Sudan from killing civilians in Darfur.