Last week, the PBS program “Frontline” broadcast a documentary on the genocide in Darfur, described as the first genocide of the 21st century. After the genocide in Rwanda in the nineties, “Never Again” was heard as a universal response to the lack of action resulting in the barbaric loss of approximately one million lives, in the main over an historic-record time period of only several weeks. However, the response to Darfur, which like most genocides has unfolded over a matter of years, has been mainly more of the same from genocides past, of resolutions without action, which some have responded to by saying that if words could kill, the UN would have died of shame long ago. The Clinton Administration, which had not taken action in Rwanda, eventually responded to the crimes against humanity in Kosovo by going to war along with NATO allies, after the UN Security Counsel was stymied from action by Russia, just as it is largely being stymied by China today in Darfur. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who also was criticized for lack of action in Rwanda, subsequently supported a new doctrine of “Responsibility To Protect”, which was developed by the Canadian government and a network of humanitarian aid experts, and was approved by the General Assembly in 2005. The basic concept puts extreme human rights abuses above national sovereignty. It could be a first step toward the UN Human Rights Charter actually being enforced—by armed force intervening in the affairs of sovereign nations under extreme conditions—when such nations commit genocide and crimes against humanity of a massive nature, throughy unspeakable butchery, as well as related destruction of ethnic populations through hunger and enviromental degradation. It may be some time, at best, before the UN can evolve through cooperation to creating something such as a standby force from all member nations in order to carry out such a policy and the political institutions and will to use them. However, this has been an evolution of enormous potential historical and global importance. In the meantime, the only practical use of force if needed in extreme situations may be regional security and other organizations, coalitions and nations willing to do so under the auspices of various UN declarations and resolutions, in a somewhat ad hoc manner by definition until there is international institutional consensus, with all the attached risks, as the only opportunity to stop genocide and like crimes against humanity that are allowing unspeakable human cruelty and suffering to continue. Do you believe that the concept of the “Responsibility To Protect”, adopted in September 2005 by the UN General Assembly constituted of all member nations, regardless of your views of how stymied the UN has continued to be by nationalism, or conversely how concerned about loss of sovereignty you might be, is a necessary if imperfect step toward a global human consensus that just as in our neighborhoods, we cannot allow the neighborhood of Planet Earth and its people to be violated in the most horrific ways imaginable, and that without the guarantee of at least some level of atrocity against human beings institutionalized as more important morally and legally than national sovereignty, the world will be condemned to a level of chaos that will increasingly risk human survival in general?