Step one, at the very least, would be sanctions against Sudan. A U.S. proposal for this is, not surprisingly, being blocked by France, which does not surprise me.

Of course, sanctions only work if the leaders feel the pain. And how often does that happen?

The painful truth is that situations like this can sometimes only be dealt with by going in and cleaning the place out. That this action is difficult, painful, and expensive is obvious from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sovereignity has its limits. If the guy in the house next door is killing renters and burying them in the back yard, the cops get to knock his door down. But only after meeting certain requirements. That's how it's supposed to work, and wouldn't it be cool if we could do that with nations?

Which brings us to the $64,000 question: who do you trust to be the cops? In an ideal world, the United Nations would fill this role.

Here is my position on the United Nations:

The United Nations, as it currently exists, is fatally flawed. It may have been fatally flawed since it accepted the Soviet Union as a permanent security council member after WWII. I can't say there was much choice in the matter, but it was the equivalent of putting Al Capone on an FBI organized crime committee.

1. It does not distinguish between nations that support individual rights and collectivist tyrannies. All are permitted an equal say in issues.

2. It has adopted, as a rule, a philosophical stance which is hard over against Western values such as individualism and capitalism, and supports collectivism of all sorts.

3. The corruption of the organization is unquestionable. We are only beginning to scratch the surface. If some people would get as bent out of shape about this as they do about Halliburton, it would be refreshing.

4. To be effective as a world peacekeeping force, nations would have to defer their own self-defense to the United Nations, much as free citizens under a proper government designate their inherent right to self-defense to that government. This is not acceptable as long as the U.N. allows tyrannies to wield power, as long as corruption is rampant, and as long as the root philosophy of that organization is opposed to Western values.

5. For the record, I believe the United Nations has done some excellent work in humanitarian areas. My objections to the organization are largely limited to its efforts in political arenas, peacekeeping, and protecting the world from some of its own members.

So, extending my "cops" analogy a bit, we are in a situation where the cops are corrupt, on the take, and some of the force is actually comprised of the goons they're supposed to be dealing with. Fortunately, they don't have a lot of their own guns, or they'd pretty much run the joint. The "citizens" have to rely on themselves for self-defense--the equivalent of a frontier society. Workable, but in all the movies I've seen, most people really want the "law to come to Pecos."

The solution to moving this situation forward would either be a massive reform of the United Nations, or building a new organization from scratch, possibly using NATO as a base. In my opinion, only the latter is practical.

If we get to a point where we can trust a world-wide organization of nations, we might be more willing to work with it.

In the old days, when wars were fought with lines of troops, columns of tanks, and bombers, you could let tyrants stew in their own juices. How many people worried about Idi Amin doing something to affect Americans? Now the rules have been changed. Two dozen guys with visas, plane tickets, and boxcutters can flatten part of Manhattan. And when you plug chemical and biological weapons into this type of warfare, we don't have the luxury of just sitting on our backsides and issuing decrees any more. Both sides of the political spectrum are slowly feeling their way through this new paradigm. We're in the middle of it now, and we were dropped there before we ever had a single soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq, before Bush was ever elected. Unless you can see the bigger picture, you aren't going to get it.

I have answered this question more than once, and I think almost in so many words. You just don't like the answers.