EL MULTILATERALISMO mal entendido está haciendo que Sudán pueda seguir asesinando impunemente, escribe Mark Steyn:

The point is that today's humanitarians are too busy for Sudan. Ask Barbra Streisand and she'd say, "Sudan Hussein? Bush lied!!!" As for Kipling, if he were around today, he'd be tied up with the big Not In Our Name march with fellow versifiers Harold Pinter and Andrew Motion. Or possibly he'd be preening with Ashley Judd and Rupert Everett and other experts at the big world Aids conference in Bangkok, and getting his photo taken next to an effigy of George W Bush smeared with blood. America spends more money combating Aids than the rest of the world combined, but why let some petty number-crunching spoil your fun?

Darling Rupert denounced Bush's Aids plan for Africa as "extremely frightening" because of its "judgmental attitude" toward sex. Kofi Annan was also critical of Bush's initiative, mainly because all those billions of dollars are being spent directly by America in Africa, rather than being sluiced through the UN.

Now that the Oil-for-Fraud programme has come to an end, many UN bureaucrats are at a loose end and would have been only too happy to bring their experience and efficiency to bear on Bush's pathetically pitifully footling judgmental $15 billion. Once the UN's administration fee had been deducted, there could easily have been enough left over to buy 20 thousand bucks' worth of condoms, no doubt from a rubber factory co-owned by the husband of an old mistress of Jacques Chirac's.

The Americans could probably make a difference in Sudan, too. The USAF could target and bomb the Janjaweed as effectively as they did the Taliban. But then John Mann and Harold Pinter and Rupert Everett would get their knickers in a twist, and everyone from John Kerry to Polly Toynbee would complain that it's "illegitimate" unless it's authorised by the UN. The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead.

The UN system is broken beyond repair. In May, even as its proxies were getting stuck into their ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan was elected to a three-year term on the UN Human Rights Commission. This isn't an aberration: Zimbabwe is also a member. The very structure of the organisation, under which countries vote in regional blocs, encourages such affronts to decency.

The Sudanese representative, by the way, immediately professed himself concerned by human rights abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

ACTUALIZACIÓN: Más indicios de que el gobierno sudanés es cómplice de las matanzas. Más en este enlace.