OxBlog

Thursday, February 10, 2005

# Posted 5:31 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

KRISTOF WANTS IT BOTH WAYS: Hippercritical says it doesn't make sense. Last fall, Nick Kristof was among the vocal advocates of calling a spade a spade and declaring that mass murder in Darfur amounts to genocide.

In a recent report on Darfur, the UN refused to label the murders as genocide. But instead of criticizing the UN, Kristof attacks Bush for preventing the UN from referring Darfur to the International Criminal Court. Naturally, Kristof doesn't mention that the ICC may be completely toothless, so his complaint about Bush is sort of irrelevant.

Now, I sympathize with Kristof to a certain degree. He is a good liberal who therefore wants to be a good humanitarian and a good multilateralist. But Darfur has demonstrated once again that the multilateral response to massive human rights violations is often pathetic. At some point, Kristof and others may have to recognize that being a good liberal means becoming a bad multilateralist.
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