How to Save Darfur

Yet a ground operation in Darfur is well within NATO's capacity. The newly created 25,000-member NATO Response Force, which reaches operational capacity this October, is made for situations like this. It can deploy in five days, fight its way into a hostile area, and stay for a month before needing to be resupplied. That would be long enough to decimate Darfur's militias and secure its refugee camps before handing the job over to U.N. peacekeepers.

So far, only the boldest politicians will even whisper about such things. It's easy to see why. NATO intervention would be aimed at saving Muslim lives, but that wouldn't stop al-Qaeda from screaming about the West's recolonization of the Islamic world. Bringing stability to a region as complicated and brutalized as Darfur could take years, if not decades. U.N. peacekeepers still patrol Kosovo today, and that's an easier case.

You could fill volumes detailing the geopolitical reasons America should abandon Darfur to its fate. The argument for military action, by contrast, rests on just two tarnished words. Last week a small crowd gathered in Kigali, Rwanda. "If you don't protect the people of Darfur today," said a man named Freddy Umutanguha, "never again will we believe you when you visit Rwanda's mass graves, look us in the eye and say 'Never again.'" Try offering a geopolitical answer to that.