JUST WATCHING.(The Talk of the Town)(Darfur)

In a reflective moment shortly before Memorial Day, President Bush told reporters that he had come to regret the "tough talk" he used when taking the country to war. He rued tagging Osama bin Laden with the phrase "wanted dead or alive" and taunting Iraqi insurgents to "bring it on." The fight has not gone so simply, and, he said, "I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner." The President's wartime woes are hardly limited to his rhetoric, but as long as he is calling his own bluff it's worth remembering another line of foreign-policy swagger. Shortly after Bush took office, an adviser gave him a report on the Clinton Administration's policy of inaction during the Rwandan genocide, and on it the President wrote, "Not on my watch!" Those words have now been taken up as the rallying cry of America's anti-genocide movement--a loose, bipartisan coalition of students, human-rights professionals, church groups, editorial writers, professors, movie stars, and a few elected officials--which advocates immediate military action to stop the killing in the Darfur region of Sudan.

There is something absurdist about the existence of an anti-genocide movement. For any other anti-something campaign (anti-war, anti-tax, anti-porn), there is an opposing force (the hawks, the tax-hikers, the pornographers), while nobody, of course, is stumping for genocide. To declare oneself against it is a safe bet, even in a case as complicated as that of Darfur, a civil-war-ravaged patch of the Sahara, where many political factors and military factions have contributed to the anguish. Yet it has never been the American way to venture abroad to stop mass slaughter by force. We entered the Second World War nearly three years into the fight, and then not to save Europe's Jews but in response to a direct attack on our territory and, ultimately, to repel Fascist aggression. We did not save Cambodia from itself, and did nothing while eight hundred thousand Rwandans were killed. And, when Europe was again disfigured by concentration camps and ethnic cleansing, in the Balkans, we waited for years before pacifying Bosnia and, later, Kosovo with aerial bombardments. (Even then, the logic was as much strategic--to bring a defiant dictator to heel and restore order on nato's turf--as it was humanitarian.) We have not sent forces into Congo, although it has been riddled with massacres in the past decade, nor did we send troops to southern Sudan during the civil war there that claimed more than a million lives in the past two decades.

So it is not surprising that we have stayed out of Darfur. That, truly, is Rwanda's lesson: endangered peoples who depend on us for their salvation stand undefended. President Clinton has said that he regrets not protecting Rwanda, but during the 2000 Presidential campaign Bush identified the decision as one of the few Clinton policies he approved of. "I think the Administration did the right thing in that case," he said. "It was a horrible situation, no one liked to see it on our TV screens, but . . . I thought they made the right decision not to send U.S. troops." After the election, Bush apparently changed his attitude, and, after the invasion of Iraq--once it became clear that no weapons of mass destruction were to be found--he took to explaining the war as just the sort of humanitarian, nation-building mission that he had campaigned against. But, despite the universalist rhetoric, when both sides in Liberia's decades-old civil war pleaded, in the summer of 2003, ...