INTERNATIONAL INACTION.(The Talk of the Town)

Darfur--the world's gravest humanitarian disaster, lately deteriorating, and likely to get much worse in the coming weeks--perfectly reveals the international politics of the moment, showing all the principal actors as they are, rather than as they would like to appear. The pictures aren't flattering. Since 2004, the Bush Administration has declared the death of several hundred thousand people in Darfur to be a case of genocide, but it has devoted only fitful rhetorical outrage and even more fitful attention to the subject. It has declined to offer any American contribution to a United Nations peacekeeping force in Darfur, even though President Bush scolded the opening session of the General Assembly last month, saying that the U.N.'s "credibility" is on the line. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, met with representatives of governments at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, in New York, and, according to the Washington Post, "renewed her call for Sudan to halt a military offensive in Darfur and yield to international pressure to allow more than 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers to protect civilians there." The Bush Administration still seems to imagine that the world will jump when America tells it to. But at the U.N. the world wasn't jumping. If anything, it was laughing.

The heads of state having the best time on their recent visit to New York were those newly emboldened, largely by America's failure in Iraq, to appoint themselves tribunes of the world's oppressed: Hugo Chavez, the strutting caudillo of Venezuela; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the messianic President of Iran; and Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan's military dictator, whose years in office have seen the war-related deaths of two and a half million of his fellow-Sudanese. Bashir has threatened to wage a jihad if U.N. peacekeepers enter Darfur, and in New York he declared the reports of massacres to be "fictions" perpetrated by greedy humanitarian groups and Zionist Jews. Before the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq and the Danish cartoons, President Bashir would have found it difficult to attract much of an audience for his arguments. Today, Darfur as a Jewish-Scandinavian hoax could have legs.

Until recently, it was striking how little the elites of nearby Islamic capitals like Khartoum, Rabat, and Cairo knew or cared about the slaughter of Muslims in Darfur. It almost made their denunciations of civilian deaths in Iraq and Lebanon seem like selective outrage. That has begun to change, though not the way one might expect. Last month, an Egyptian lawyer explained to the Times why Muslim sentiment is so inflamed against the West. "The people embrace their Arab-Muslim identity and feel an injustice is done upon them in more than one place--Iraq, Palestine, Darfur, Afghanistan, Lebanon," he said. Darfur, where an Arab government unleashed Arab militias to commit massacres against Muslim African farmers, has joined the growing list of Arab grievances--against the West.

So it was all the more poignant to hear Jan Egeland, the top official at the U.N. for emergency relief and humanitarian affairs, who knows the awful stakes in Darfur as well as anyone, forced to appeal directly to Arab and Muslim leaders for help in persuading Sudan to allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur. "I'm telling non-Western powers to help us or else see that we collectively fail," he said. ...