By Ankush
This is an interesting little artifact, though not because I agree with it: Writing in The London Review of Books, Mahmood Mamdani argues from the left against a humanitarian intervention in Darfur. In essence, Mamdani leverages the realization that there is very little the US can do about the civil war in Iraq in order to argue that we shouldn't intervene in what, according to him, is the structurally similar "insurgency and counter-insurgency" going on in Darfur. Mamdani refuses to call Darfur a genocide because he thinks the populations involved can't be reduced to two distinct identities, and he has some harsh words to say about Nicholas Kristof's writing on Darfur in particular. (Kristof responded to this line of attack, convincingly in my view, last year.)
But check out the last paragraph:
