OPINIONS

across, the “sloganising politics of the past”still has the edge. People expect politics to be competitive, and ifyou are not prepared to shout, you must be prepared not to be heard. As Obama has discovered in televised debates, in the context ofa 60second window to articulate your position, nice can seem more waffly than wise. As Chesterton put it, “Tolerance is the virtue ofthe man without convictions.” Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has embraced the opposite style and is pulling ahead of Obama in the polls for the Democratic nomination. Learning from the 2004 lesson of John Kerry, whose patrician gentility left him wide open to the Swift Boat attacks of the Republicans, she is deliberately casting herselfas a bit ofa bruiser who is up for a fight. “For 15 years I have stood up against the right-wing machine,” she says, “so ifyou want a winner who knows how to take them on, I’m your girl.” Gordon Brown’s fight for the centre ground ofBritish politics may be a sound strategy in policy terms, but in terms of style he should learn from the difficulties of others and realise that the politics of nicey-nicey works better in theory than in practice. His best bet is to dispatch the gentle leader of the opposition with a clunking, impolite slug ofhis fist.

DARFUR

Send in the peacemakers BY ALEX DE WAAL

Diplomacy and a peace deal, not military intervention, offer the best hope ofsolving the Darfur crisis

The “responsibility to protect” is the doctrine that the victims of civil war or humanitarian disaster have a right to foreign succour and, in extremis, the protection of international troops, should their own government, either from incapacity or malice, fail to do the job. The principle of the responsibility to protect—“R2P”in diplomatic shorthand— was adopted unanimously by the UN general assembly in September 2005. It was a mantra for Blair’s personal foreign policy. The R2P is a noble concept, an example of progress in global moral standards. But it is impractical except in

Alex de Waal advised the African Union mediation on Darfur

the tiniest ofdysfunctional nations, such as Sierra Leone, Kosovo and East Timor, and even then at great difficulty. In a middle-sized country, the burdens and risks would tax the capability ofa superpower. Since early 2004, columnists and advocates have called for armed intervention to “save”Darfur from “genocide.”Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president ofthe International Crisis Group (ICG), heralded Darfur as the test case for R2P. While flirting with outright military intervention, Evans’s focus has been on what is known in the trade as “coercive protection”—a UN peacekeeping force that can enforce its will by UN mandate and sufficient firepower. This tries to split the difference between traditional peacekeeping and outright intervention, but as Evans and his comradesin-rhetoric have rattled their sabres over Darfur, it has become clear that the sober advice of professional peacekeepers was right all along: there is no middle way. International policies towards Darfur have failed. The world didn’t stop the immense army-Janjaweed offensives of 2003 and 2004, which killed tens ofthousands, plus perhaps a further 150,000 through starvation and disease, and displaced 2m. There’s no working peace agreement, and a few hundred people are

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