Although the small African Union force tasked with peacekeeping in Darfur has utterly failed in its mission, the Sudanese government is opposed to UN sending troops to assist.

US ambassador to the UN John Bolton said the letter was “a direct challenge” to the Security Council.

A 7,000-strong African force has failed to end Darfur’s three-year conflict.

More than 2m people have fled their homes and an estimated 200,000 people have died.

Sudan does not want the UN to take control of the peacekeeping force from the AU, saying that would be an attack on its sovereignty.

Sovereignty is not just the right of a government to keep its own house, nor it is an absolute injunction against international interference, though. Sovereignty also implies obligations and responsibilities that the Sudanese government is utterly failing to meet. Few people would argue that the UN should respect a nation’s sovereignty if a government is standing by and allowing an ethnic minority to be slaughtered in the streets.

The Sudanese government has stood powerless to stop the killing and the destruction in Darfur. While refugees flee to other countries, militias rule, ineffectual local peacekeepers dither, and the government blunders on, the only potential to stop the killing is to send in international troops. The UN has obligations on this front that it has so far failed to meet.

In allowing the AU troops to try to solve the problem, the UN actually did make the correct choice. Africa, as a whole, will never be truly successful until it has the capacity to police its own problems on the continent. But when it became apparent that the AU troops were going to fail, the UN was bound by its own charter to act to stop genocide. Of course, the UN has failed to act and will probably continue to fail to act and will probably make excuses for its failure to act even as people continue to die. And then, some day in the future when “normalcy” has returned to the region we will hear stories of atrocities, watch movies about the brutality, and raiser our voices and say, “NEVER AGAIN!”

Until the next time it happens because, let’s be serious, it will happen again and the UN will fail its mission.

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I’m not particularly fond of Senator Corzine, and there aren’t too many areas where you would find me in agreement with the gentleman from New Jersey. For that matter, I can’t imagine that I’ll be a regular reader of The Huffington Post. But when someone makes a good point, I figure it’s worth noting.

But even if you put aside the moral case for ending genocide for a moment, consider our own interests in the matter.  The failed state that is being created in the wake of this horrific crime will be a hotbed for global instability.  I was there, and I saw what’s happening.  As I stood in the refugee camps of Eastern Chad, into which hundreds of thousands of desperate people are pouring over the border, I realized how dangerous to America the situation has become.  Not only is Darfur a lawless part of an unstable state, but the conflict there is destabilizing Chad.

The refugees, even when they are receiving food and shelter, have nothing to do.  Resentment is building.  And Eastern Chad, which has insufficient resources for its own population, cannot accomodate the refugees for long.  We must stop this genocide, and we also must bring about a long-term political solution to this crisis.  With two million people in refugee camps in Chad and camps for displaced persons in Darfur, we are creating the conditions for the collapse of law and order in an entire region and, potentially, for terrorism.

There are strong moral reasons to want to see the situation in Sudan, but even strong moral reasons aren’t always enough to warrant the kind of energy and political capital that it takes to resolve a difficult, violent situation like the one we are seeing in Darfur. Making the practical case--the argument that non-involvement will be far more expensive in the long run--is far more persuasive to me.

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