SPEAKING OF THE ONGOING BRUTALITY in Darfur, Senator Hillary Clinton recently told an audience at the Munich Conference on Security Policy that “We cannot say, ‘Never again,’ as it happens before our eyes.” Since the 1994 Rwandan genocide where close to a million people were shot, hacked, and clubbed to death while U.N. member states did virtually nothing to stop it, the phrase “Never again” has been invoked thousands of times by politicians, editorialists, and U.N. officials as a call to action to prevent more ethnically targeted mass murder.

On April 7, 2004, 10 years to the day after the genocide began in Rwanda, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to unveil a “five-point plan for the United Nations to prevent future genocides.” He pointed to Darfur as the place for the United Nations to take a stand: “Whatever terms it uses to describe the situation [in Darfur, Sudan], the international community cannot stand idle. . . . Wherever civilians are deliberately targeted because they belong to a particular community, we are in the presence of potential, if not actual, genocide.” Annan continued: “Humanity must respond by taking action in its own defense. Humanity’s instrument for that purpose must be the United Nations, and specifically the Security Council.”