Students at Swarthmore recently organized a series of events and talks on the issue of genocide, largely prompted by the 10th anniversary of the killings in Rwanda. Without consciously planning around that anniversary, I’ve also found that a significant amount of my teaching this year has revolved around the events in Rwanda and subsequent events in the Congo.

As part of a faculty panel organized by the students, my colleague James Kurth proposed a new international “humanitarian intervention force” designed to replace the largely useless structure of United Nations peacekeeping. Somewhat mischieviously (I think) he also proposed that the people serving in this force be drawn from the ranks of well-meaning liberal and left-wing college students who now believe that an intervention should have happened ten years ago in Rwanda. This was an extension of his very strong criticisms of the passivity and disinterest of liberal Americans (as well as conservatives) in 1994 in the face of clear evidence of genocide in Rwanda. Everyone, he concluded, likes to believe now, in the wake of Samantha Power’s searing j’accuse , A Problem from Hell, that an intervention should have happened, but hardly anyone at the time seemed to be willing to agitate for it.

I agree with him on this point. It is one reason that I think the neoconservative attack on the United Nations and other international frameworks in the run-up to the War in Iraq was largely justified. Rwanda, and before that Somalia and a number of other crises, revealed that the pre-Iraq framework for international protection of human rights was morally and pragmatically bankrupt, unable to live up to its promises, unable to mediate between a paper commitment to universal human rights and the defense of inviolable sovereignities. It was that bankruptcy that allowed neoconservatives to seize the project of humanitarian intervention as their own, because there wasn’t anything else viable on the table.

Now we are at a critical moment in another place, in the Sudan—some would say well past that moment. Anybody who reads Power and endorses her attack on inaction then is pretty well obligated to line up behind some kind of intervention now—or is obligated to scribble over their support for her critique and go back to the drawing board. Because there is no question that the Sudan is right now and has been for some time the site of genocidal violence and mass suffering. If that is the trigger for action, then the trigger has been pulled.

It is always different to look ahead to what needs to be done than to point fingers at what was done by others. Suppose one accepts the obligation to act in the Sudan. Now what? Rwanda was a very small country: it is just possible to imagine, as Romeo Dallaire does, that a small international force exerting minimal power and operating on a limited scale could have been sufficient to stop the elites behind Hutu Power from exercising their plans.

The Sudan, in contrast, is a huge nation, one of the largest in Africa. The government’s violent assaults on parts of the country’s population are masked by the use of irregulars and insurgents. The government’s armed opponents are just as morally repugnant and prone to massacres of civilians. There is no principled way to separate good actors from bad actors here. Any serious intervention that took place without the assent of all or most of the combatants would have to involve huge numbers of troops and very substantial resources, and would have to tackle extremely sticky questions about the future of the Sudanese state and the possibility of partition—something that most African heads of state would bitterly oppose. Much as I dislike the “ancient conflicts” trope, and don’t regard it as applicable here, it is nevertheless true that the structural roots of the civil conflicts of the past two decades in the Sudan lie at least a century deep. Even if Dallaire is right about Rwanda, no one can seriously envision the same minimalist scenario here.

In practical terms, imagining this intervention is an impossibility. The United States is brutally overextended in every possible respect, and without US support and assistance, such an intervention is virtually impossible. (I can’t get past this point without observing that this is yet another cost that I would put on the negative side of the ledger for the war in Iraq: it has precluded the possibility of humanitarian interventions elsewhere, at least for the immediate future.) The international political climate makes it staggeringly unlikely that any leader of any state would seriously argue for a major intervention.

“Never again” sounds powerful, urgent, necessary. Now we see, however, why the one thing that we can safely predict is that we’ll continue to say it and not fully mean it, that we’ll always be angling ourselves to point fingers after the killing stops at those others, some others, who didn’t do anything when they could have done something. In the Sudan, honesty should compel us: our fingers point always to ourselves. No one is or will be innocent. Not people for the war in Iraq, and not people against it. No one will or should brandish A Problem From Hell at others to damn them with it, because I see no real possibility of a substantial intervention in an ongoing crisis whose total human toll is already comparable to Rwanda’s.