i know! let's invade!

'If only we had known' --by David Batstone It's a phrase we use commonly in Western democracies once the horrific stories of a genocide reach the light of day. The Nazi "final solution" in Europe, the Cambodian killing fields, and the Bosnian "ethnic cleansing" all serve to jar our trust in human decency. It stuns us that humans could act so brutally toward a people in a sustained, calculated way. "If only we had known." We utter it as a moral statement that if we learned of a genocide in progress, we would do something to stop it. In 1998, then-President Bill Clinton visited Rwanda and made a historic apology to the Rwandan people that the United States under his leadership virtually stood by in 1994 while up to 800,000 people lost their lives to rampant militia violence. Here is Clinton speaking with perhaps more candor than at any other time in his presidency: We did not act quickly enough after the killing began. We should not have allowed the refugee camps to become safe havens for the killers. We did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide. We cannot change the past. But we can and must do everything in our power to help you build a future without fear, and full of hope.... We owe to all the people in the world our best efforts to organize ourselves so that we can maximize the chances of preventing these events. And where they cannot be prevented, we can move more quickly to minimize the horror. That chance - or better put, moral demand - to do the right thing in Africa has come. Genocide is taking place in Darfur, Sudan. Government troops and their allied militia, known as the Janjaweed, have committed atrocities across Darfur that have displaced close to 2.5 million darker-skinned African villagers. U.N. and U.S. officials claim they have evidence that the government in Khartoum has backed the Janjaweed militia and supplied it with weapons. Human rights groups and aid workers calculate that more than 400,000 people may be dead, and that gruesome total grows by the day. On Sept. 9, 2004, the Bush administration acknowledged this fact, but frankly it has failed to take sufficient action to stop the violence. We must now urge the Bush administration to take every step necessary through the United Nations to 1) Establish a mandate for an international force to protect civilians; and 2) Deploy such a force in support of existing African Union efforts in Darfur. The urgency and gravity of what is taking place in Sudan requires people of faith to build new alliances. Both the National Association of Evangelicals and the National Council of Churches have made strong calls on the Bush administration to make concerted efforts to bring an end to the violence. Both the Vatican and the World Jewish Congress are speaking loudly and clearly for their communities to act now to save Darfur. Our good will must turn into strategic political action, together. Sojourners is joining in an effort to gather at least 400,000 signatures - to give voice to those in Sudan who have lost their lives in the violence - calling on President Bush to take immediate action, through the U.N., to support international intervention to stop the genocide in Darfur. In the movie Hotel Rwanda, a journalist remarks that when Americans watch TV images of the massacres, "They'll say, 'Oh my God, that's horrible!' And then go on eating their dinners." We cannot allow genocide to take place on our watch. Take a stand and tell the world: "Not this time."