I mentioned earlier how impressed I was by the questions from the students at the FSU Wesley Foundation following the screening of the documentary Invisible Children. They were very probing questions about what the specifics were about what our government could do.
A similar train of thought is in an article by Nina Shea on today's National Review Online. She takes to task one of the most visible "save Darfur" organizations for, as I would put it, de-emphasizing the hard task of deriving practical solutions to make this stop. Just to be sure that Shea wasn't being unfair, I went to the main site of the Save Darfur Coalition. Indeed, it seems to be heavy on the "wear a wristband and tell our government to just do something" type approach, although President Bush's recent initiatives appear to be getting a fair amount of play.
Shea's point is that "genocides don't just happen." In this case, she claims that it is a fiction that the government of Sudan wants this to stop. So, the real policy issue is what incentives do we have to change the behavior of these very specific people? We faced this in Kosovo, and ended up with a military operation.
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