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Hi, Mark!
     The Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall will be here in Ottawa next week, and that reminds me of one of my favourite columns of yours, which you wrote after the death of Princess Margaret, recalling a luncheon you were at attended by HRH and Vera Lynn.  I’d love a reprint, if possible.

David Rettie
Ottawa

MARK SAYS: Actually, this one's available round the clock in my anthology of obituaries, Mark Steyn's Passing Parade. But we get a lot of requests for this, so here it is again. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

HRH The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, 1930-2002
from Mark Steyn's Passing Parade

I haven't seen any official Canadian statements offering condolences to the Queen on the death of Princess Margaret. Perhaps the Bloc, as part of its heroic revolutionary struggle, has vetoed them. But I note that most reports begin with references to “years of heavy smoking” or, alternatively, “of heavy smoking and drinking”. The great Australian wag Tim Blair contrasts this with the obituaries for Linda McCartney, who was respectfully styled as a “committed vegetarian”: when a committed vegetarian dies of cancer at 56, it’s just one of those things, could’ve happened to anyone; when a heavy smoker/drinker lives out her three score and ten, she’s a victim of her addictions.

I can testify to her prodigious intake. A few years ago, I was on the judges’ panel of some music prize and, come the awards ceremony, found myself sitting across the table from Her Royal Highness. This was way back in the mid-Nineties and even then the lunch had the vague feel of a parody Royal occasion. I’d been put next to Vera Lynn, Britain’s famed “Forces’ Sweetheart” of World War Two, celebrated songstress of “We’ll Meet Again” and “(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover”. She sent back the avocado, sniffing “This French food disagrees with me.” That’s the Dunkirk spirit.

Over the table, Princess Margaret seemed tetchy and irritable and, after some whispering with our host, the compère of the occasion stood up and announced that we would have the Loyal Toast a little early “thus enabling a certain personage among us to smoke”. For any Bloquiste readers, I should explain that the Loyal Toast to Her Majesty comes at the end of the meal, after which guests are permitted to light up. But, for the first time in my experience, the Loyal Toast was being scheduled in the middle of the hors d’oeuvres. So, halfway through the avocado, we all shuffled to our feet, raised our glasses, toasted “The Queen!” and, before our bottoms had hit the upholstery, Princess Margaret had whipped out her ivory cigarette holder, loaded up, and was awaiting a light.

According to the obituaries, she was a 30-a-day gal. By my reckoning, she got through a good couple of dozen over lunch. By the time Vera Lynn sent back the fish and asked them to bring her some chicken, Her Highness had had at least three. By the time Dame Vera sent back the chicken, telling the waiter “This is inedible”, Her Highness had had maybe six or seven. By the time Dame Vera remarked to me that “the colour of your jacket is making me nauseous”, Her Highness was on her second pack. She smoked between mouthfuls, she smoked between gulps, she smoked between cigarettes.

The Princess’ understanding of the deal was admirable in its simplicity. She had lent her Royal lustre to the occasion, and in return she expected to be entertained. I ventured an amusing anecdote - short, colourful, breezy set-up, zinger of a punch line. She seemed to be enjoying it, until, ten seconds before the end, she cut me off and demanded to know, “Has anyone seen Jurassic Park?” Someone had, and started to tell a Spielberg story, but again she cut him off and moved on to someone else. I’d got it figured out by now: When the cigarette burned down to approx. three-eighths of an inch from the filter, she’d kill your anecdote stone dead. If you could raconte quicker than she could smoke, you had a sporting chance.

She handed out the prizes with noticeable lack of enthusiasm – I’m comparing her not just to Di but to the Queen - and then tottered off, a tiny woman, barely five foot, atop huge chunky shoes, like Minnie Mouse with an attitude problem. “She was on good form today,” an old Royal hand told me. “Doesn’t always go as well.” Someone said that the Princess had given the elderly lady-in-waiting accompanying her a toilet brush for Christmas because the Princess had had to use the bathroom at her house and discovered she hadn’t got one.

The awards were supposed to honour up-and-coming young talent, but in my corner of the room, between Vera and Margaret, the whole thing seemed suffused in the grim monochrome austerity of post-war Britain. “Post-war Britain” is a term that covers not just a couple of years in the late Forties, but an entire era, constraints such as petrol rationing stretching languorously on to taint a generation, from VE Day to, well, somewhere “between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles’ first LP”, to quote Philip Larkin. In Britain’s post-war baby boom, there were babies, but no boom. I have no first-hand experience of the time or place - I wasn’t even a twinkle in my parents’ eyes, they being barely twinkles themselves - but I always like the bit in pretty much any Mordecai Richler novel when the young Montreal protagonist arrives in 1950s London and is shocked by what the locals call the totty. “Where were the girls?” wonders Jake in St Urbain’s Horseman. “Oh my God, the ones he saw in the pubs were so depressingly lumpy, all those years of bread-and-dripping and sweets and fishpaste sandwiches having entered their young bodies like a poison, coming out here as a moustache, there as a chilblain, and like lead through the teeth.”

In a world where even the pin-ups were homely and/or beefy chantoozies like Dame Vera, Anne Shelton and Alma Cogan, Princess Margaret Rose was a rare bloom. If you look at the early portraits of the young princesses, Margaret and Elizabeth, they have the same features - same eyes, same lips, same nose, same curls, same impressive Windsor bosom - but there’s a flash in Margaret’s eyes, a tease in the lips. The Queen is all business, her sister hints at pleasure. Fifty years ago, on the death of her father, Princess Elizabeth returned from Kenya to London as Queen and was greeted at the airport by Churchill, who was so overcome by grief he could barely speak his words of condolence. The Queen is said to have replied, “A sad homecoming. But a smooth flight.” Yes, well, there we are. Mustn’t grumble. All very English.

Margaret, on the other hand, ran with a raffish West End fast set. Unlike the rest of the family, she had no interest in the country, not the British kind anyway. When she left town, it was not for Sandringham or Balmoral, but Tuscany or Mustique. Her affair with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a dashing divorcé, became public on the very day of her sister’s Coronation, when she was seen on the porch of Westminster Abbey familiarly brushing a piece of fluff from his uniform. When their love survived the machinations of courtiers, she was forced to make the classic Royal choice and announced she would not marry him, “mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth.” That would be us.

How quaintly Ruritanian it seems. “Is love the only thing?” Princess Flavia asks her English adventurer in The Prisoner Of Zenda. “If love were the only thing, I would follow you - in rags, if need be - to the world’s end; for you hold my heart in the hollow of your hand!.. But honour binds a woman too, Rudolf. My honour lies in being true to my country and my House.”

The bright eyes dimmed. The dazzling smile soured. In some of the group shots for Charles and Di’s wedding, Princess Margaret’s the only one who doesn’t seem to be under any illusions. She never found a role, only endless lunches like the one above, dinners and receptions, charities and openings, in London and Toronto, Belize and Botswana, the sum of whose parts never added up to any kind of coherent whole. She was a great booster of, for example, Aids charities but never flaunted her saintliness Diana-style. Meanwhile, after her Battle of Britain hero was deemed unsuitable, she ran around with Peter Sellers, Mick Jagger, and a Welsh gardener 17 years her junior, the emblem of duty decaying into an emblem of disappointment, and dissolution. I wouldn’t have wanted to live her life and, if the price of its frustrations is that you smoke during the soup course and screw up showbiz anecdotes and give toilet brushes for Christmas, well, that’s fine by me. But, as on Coronation Day, on the eve of the Golden Jubilee the Queen has been upstaged by her sister once again - for few people sum up so well how far English society’s travelled from those drab, pinched British Fifties.

from Mark Steyn's Passing Parade

Dear Mark,
     The Lisbon Treaty looks like a done deal. As we say goodbye to national sovereignty in Europe, it might be a good time to reprint one of your columns from their first attempt to force this on us, as a "European Constitution".

Gillian Andrews

MARK SAYS: I wrote a lot about the EU Constitution four or five years ago, usually after running into M Giscard somewhere along the way, claiming to be Europe's Jefferson. And it was always clear to me, as I write below, that they'd shove it down your throat one way or the other. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

A stitch-up in time
from The Daily Telegraph, May 24th 2005

The Eurovision Song Contest is not always a reliable guide to the broader political currents coursing through the Continent. One recalls the 1990 finals in Zagreb, when the charming hostess, Helga Vlahovic, presented her own fair country as the perfect Eurometaphor: "Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra," she cooed. "The string section and the wood section all sit together." Alas, barely were the words out of her mouth before the wood section was torching the string section's dressing rooms, and the hills were alive only with the ancient siren songs of ethnic cleansing and genital severing. Lurching into its final movement, Yugoslavia was no longer the orchestra, only the pits.

But this year's winner, Miss Helena Paparizou of Greece, was a shrewder analyst of the geopolitical scene. Her triumphant My Number One is an eerily perceptive summation of the EU establishment's view of its ingrate electorates this pre-referendum week:

With the new constitution flailing in most polls, the Dutch government is being rather vicious already. Bernard Bot, the foreign minister, dismisses the electorate's objections as "a lot of irrational reaction". Piet-Hein Donner, the justice minister, warns that Europe will go the way of Helga's orchestra if the constitution is rejected. "Yugoslavia was more integrated than the Union is now," he points out, "but bad will and the inability to stifle hidden irritations and rivalry led in a short time to war."

Scornful of such piffling analogies, the prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, thinks a Balkan end is the least of their worries. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," he says. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe."

At the Theresienstadt (or Terezin) concentration camp in what's now the Czech Republic, Sweden's European Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, declared: "There are those who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads."

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot is apparently: yes to the European Constitution, or yes to a new Holocaust. If there's a neither-of-the-above box, the EU's rulers are keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent's peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal whackoes champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I'm not unsympathetic to. But it's a curious rationale to pitch to one's electorate: vote for us; we're the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. Or as the cute but gloomy Omar Naber, the Slovenian Eurovision entrant, put it in his Naberly way:

And, insofar as the past 60 years in Europe have been comparatively non-bloody, that's surely due to Nato and the American military presence, both of which your average EU apparatchik would scrap in an instant without worrying about Theresienstadts looming round the corner. The nearest to a latterday Theresienstadt was Yugoslavia and that didn't exactly reflect well on the EU. Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg and as the holder of the rotating Euro-Presidency the Union's chief negotiator with the disintegrating Yugoslavia, told the Americans to butt out and declared: "The hour of Europe has come!" The hour of Europe came and went, and a couple hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too grateful for the Americans to butt back in again.

Why does so much of the continental governing class carry on like the sinister Mitteleuropean shrink from a 1940s melodrama, insisting that you're far too unstable to be allowed to leave the sanatorium? Well, either they're the loopy ones or they're desperate, and they'd rather talk about a new Holocaust than any of the more pressing questions - Turkey, the unsustainable euro, unemployment, over-regulation, deathbed demographics. Or maybe they talk about the Second World War because that's the only genuine pan-European topic.

Whatever the answer, the concentration-camps-around-the-corner argument is at least a useful glimpse into how the Eurocrats regard the citizenry. However the French and Dutch votes go, it seems unlikely that the EU's rulers will allow anything as footling as the will of the people to derail the project at this late stage. In Euro-referendums, there's only one correct answer; it's just that sometimes you have to have two votes before the people figure out which one it is. My sense is that the French will vote narrowly for the constitution and the Dutch will narrowly reject it, but either way the EU will figure out a way to inflict it on the Continent. A stitch-up in time saves, nein?

At least Saggy Hussein has his Y-fronts: "Look upon my briefs, ye Mighty, and despair!" as Shelley wrote. By contrast, the EU Emperors have no clothes other than their magic invisible Holocaust-repelling cloaks. They may win the vote, but the way they've conducted the campaign suggests that they know they've lost the argument. Perhaps that explains the markedly elegiac quality to so many Eurovision songs this year, to which the Cypriot entry was a notable exception:

Messrs Chirac and Balkanende may claim to feel around them the desire for their bloated statist constitution. But for more and more Europeans the fire's long gone out. If ever anyone needed a real Euro-vision, it's the tired scaremongers of the Continent's political class.

Mark,
     I am sick to my stomach listening to Obama and his team say they could accept the Taliban returning to power in Afghanistan. You wrote a column when they fell about how indifferent feminist groups were about Afghan women. Could you re-publish it?

Lynn Rosen
Florida

MARK SAYS: Certainly. This is included in The Face Of The Tiger, if you'd like to have a copy to hand permanently. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

Omar's girls
from The Face Of The Tiger

November 29th 2001
All of the west’s flabby intellectual elites have had problems with September 11th, but it’s the professional feminists who are really feeling the squeeze (if they’ll pardon the expression). They started confidently enough. In the stirring clarion call of Professor Sunera Thobani of the University of British Columbia (your tax dollars at work!), speaking at a feminist conference two weeks after the attack, “There will be no emancipation for women anywhere on this planet until the western domination of this planet is ended.”

Meanwhile, the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism And War, which includes Susan Sarandon, Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker and about 75 other sisters and is “Worldwide” mainly in the sense the World Series is, organized a petition called “Not In Our Name”. “We will not support the bombing,” they declared, and who can blame them? I dropped out of women’s studies in Grade Two, but, as I recall, a bombing campaign is a quintessential act of patriarchal oppression and sexual domination. The male pilot, looming over the curvy undulating form of the Third World hillside, unzips his bomb carriage and unleashes his phallic ordinance to penetrate his target. Needless to say, he explodes on contact, typical bloody men.

Unfortunately, this thesis, while it may get you a Federal grant from Hedy Fry, took a bit of a knock after the fall of Kabul, when to the surprise of the Worldwide Sisterhood the Afghan sisters began emerging from their hoods. Momentarily stunned, the feminists nimbly discovered a whole new set of grievances. Oh, sure, Bush is making a big deal about women’s rights in Afghanistan now, but where was he five years ago when the Taliban first showed up? Well, five years ago, he was in Austin, Texas, and the guy with his feet under the desk in the White House never did a thing - though, if ever there was a fellow with a vested interest in ensuring that impenetrable facial hoods for ladies never caught on, it was surely Mr Clinton.

But now the Taliban’s gone and, of all the various factions negotiating a broad-based government, only the original patriarch – the old king – has plans to include any broads. Washington, said Gloria Steinem, was colluding in “gender apartheid”. Well, yes, it’s regrettable that there appear to be no Pashtun Janet Renos on the horizon in Kabul, and the Jalalabad Playhouse has yet to book The Vagina Monologues, and that Take Your Daughter To Work Day has not been written into the Constitution. But, on the other hand, Don’t Take Your Daughter To School Year is now off the calendar; Afghan females will be able to be educated, get jobs, receive proper medical treatment, walk unaccompanied in public, show their faces and dress as they wish.

It was this last point that the more inventive feminists seized on. As The Boston Globe put it, “The war on terrorism has certainly raised our awareness of the ways in which women’s bodies are controlled by a repressive regime in a far away land, but what about the constraints on women’s bodies here at home?” This was in a column entitled “The Burka And The Bikini” by Jacquelyn Jackson, a “women’s health advocate”, and Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a historian at Cornell University and author of The Body Project: An Intimate History Of American Girls. “Taliban rule has dictated that women be fully covered whenever they enter the public realm, while a recent US television commercial for ‘Temptation Island 2’ features near naked women,” they pointed out. “American girls and women have been stripped bare by a sexually expressive culture whose beauty dictates have exerted a major toll on their physical and emotional health.”

Got that? Afghan men make their women cover up, western men make their women strip off.

But, according to the Montreal Gazette, quite the opposite is true: Afghan men make their women cover up – and so do we! “The burqa has many forms,” writes Linda Gilman Novak. “North American females are urged to wear burqas of a different sort. Their appearance is subtle and sophisticated and not as easy to identify.” I’ll say.

Still, Ms Gilman Novak does her best. She has noticed that various advertisements for Say What? Sweaters, Cover Girl mascara, Bonnebell makeup and Esprit clothing show models with turtlenecks pulled up to cover their mouths and copy lines like, “I let my eyes do the talking.”

“This is the sporty, outerwear version of the burqa,” writes Ms Gilman Novak. “Young girls learn from these images what society expects of them when they mature, and the message that rings loud and clear is that to speak out is not ‘ladylike’. Girls grow up conditioned to be silent. Advertising tyrannizes women in our culture. It is the Taliban of North American society.”

To be honest, the only reason I stumbled across the column was because of the come-hither eyes of the Esprit model, which the Gazette’s editors placed slap in the centre of the comment page. Ms Gilman Novak wouldn’t be impressed to learn that, long before Say What? Sweaters came along, people were letting their eyes do the talking. The gateway to the soul, and so forth:

Who’s right? The Boston Globe gals or the Montreal Gazette’s? Are we western Taliban making women strip off or cover up? Well, the answer is: Both. Neither. Who cares?

The point the Misses have missed is that the burqa was not a “cultural confine”, but the law: if you went for a stroll in Kabul wearing a turtleneck, you’d be arrested. And even “cultural confines” are mostly confined to non-western cultures – for example, to those Muslim societies where it’s the “cultural tradition” for men whose sisters get raped to kill them. In 2001, North American women face no “cultural confines”. If relentless messages about “body image” are tyrannizing American women into bulimia, how come it’s the fattest society in human history? Go to a suburban Multiplex any night of the week and you can watch Julia Roberts or Gwyneth Paltrow surrounded by an audience whose distaff side weighs an average 250 lbs and is happily chowing down on supersized extra-buttery popcorn. Whatever oppressive messages about “body image” are being transmitted, these gals are cheerfully ignoring; they long ago burst any “cultural confines”. Men, on the whole, don’t go for the Kate Moss type but would prefer something a little under 300 lbs, but it’s perfectly obvious that their views on the matter are utterly irrelevant. If you stroll around downtown Washington, you can’t help noticing that, in contrast to the heels and cleavage of Paris and Rome and almost every other western capital, there’s nothing but a vast tide of women in sneakers and comfortable, shapeless clothing.

This is their right as free citizens. But, when feminists yak on about “cultural confines”, they’re denying the very essence of liberty – that each of us is free to choose and therefore responsible for his or her actions. To equate the turtleneck with the Taliban requires a failure of the imagination bordering on the psychotic: imagine never being allowed to feel sunlight on your face – by law.

Most women understand this. The traditional “gender gap” in wars - women are usually between 10 and 15% behind men in their approval of military action – has statistically all but vanished: 86% of American men back the Afghan campaign, 79% of women. So the more interesting question is why there’s such a huge gap between the overwhelming majority of women and the feminists who claim to represent them. Pace Professor Thobani, the west does not dominate the world because it  “exploits” people, but because it emancipates them – it untaps its greatest resource, its citizens, and invites them to exploit their own potential. Some will rise to high office (Condi Rice), some will make a nice living cranking out ridiculous theses for a lucrative niche market (Joan Jacobs Brumberg). But, if you want one phrase that encapsulates the difference between the society we live in and the ones our enemies wish to impose, it’s this: the treatment of women. The gal in the street gets it. A pity the stars of the sisterhood don’t.

from The Face Of The Tiger

Dear Mark,
     Now that the Obama Administration is apparently ready to work with the mass murderers of the Sudan, I wonder if you could rerun your column about what a joke the left's campaign for Darfur was.

Michael Weinberg

MARK SAYS: Well, I've written many Darfur columns over the years, so I'm not sure which one you had in mind. But this, from Down Under, seems to fit the bill. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

Not serious
from The Australian, May 8th 2006

I see George Clooney and Angelina Jolie have discovered Darfur and are now demanding "action". Good for them. Hollywood hasn't shown this much interest in indigenous groups of the Sudan since John Payne and Jerry Colonna sang "The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish" in Garden of the Moon (1938).

I wish the celebs well. Those of us who wanted action on Darfur years ago will hope their advocacy produces more results than ours did. Clooney's concern for the people of the region appears to be genuine and serious. But unless he's also serious about backing the only forces in the world with the capability and will to act in Sudan, he's just another showboating pretty boy of no use to anyone.

Here's the lesson of the past three years: The UN kills.

In 2003, you'll recall, the US was reviled as a unilateralist cowboy because it and its coalition of the poodles waged an illegal war unauthorised by the UN against a sovereign state run by a thug regime that was no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders, which it killed in large numbers (Kurds and Shia).

Well, Washington learned its lesson. Faced with another thug regime that's no threat to anyone apart from selected ethnocultural groups within its borders which it kills in large numbers (African Muslims and southern Christians), the unilateralist cowboy decided to go by the book. No unlawful actions here. Instead, meetings at the UN. Consultations with allies. Possible referral to the Security Council.

And as I wrote on this page in July 2004: "The problem is, by the time you've gone through the UN, everyone's dead." And as I wrote in Britain's Daily Telegraph in September 2004: "The US agreed to go the UN route and it looks like they'll have a really strongish compromise resolution ready to go about a week after the last villager's been murdered and his wife gang-raped."

Several hundred thousand corpses later Clooney is now demanding a "stronger multinational force to protect the civilians of Darfur".

Agreed. So let's get on to the details. If by "multinational" Clooney means a military intervention authorised by the UN, then he's a poseur and a fraud, and we should pay him no further heed. Meaningful UN action is never gonna happen. Sudan has at least two Security Council vetoes in its pocket: China gets 6 per cent of its oil from the country, while Russia has less obviously commercial reasons and more of a general philosophical belief in the right of sovereign states to butcher their own.

So forget a legal intervention authorised by the UN. If by "multinational" Clooney means military participation by the Sudanese regime's co-religionists, then dream on. The Arab League, as is its wont when one of its bloodier members gets a bad press, has circled the camels and chosen to confer its Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval on Khartoum by holding its most recent summit there.

So who, in the end, does "multinational action" boil down to? The same small group of nations responsible for almost any meaningful global action, from Sierra Leone to Iraq to Afghanistan to the tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia and on to East Timor and the Solomon Islands. The same core of English-speaking countries, technically multinational but distressingly unicultural and unilingual and indeed, given that most of them share the same head of state, uniregal.

The US, Britain, Australia and Canada (back in the game in Afghanistan) certainly attract other partners, from the gallant Poles to the Kingdom of Tonga. But, whatever international law has to say on the subject, the only effective intervention around the world comes from ad hoc coalitions of the willing led by the doughty musketeers of the Anglosphere. Right now who's on the ground dragging the reluctant Sudanese through their negotiations with the African Union? America's Deputy Secretary of State Bob Zoellick and Britain's International Development Secretary Hilary Benn. Sorry, George, that's as "multinational" as it's gonna get.

Clooney made an interesting point a few weeks ago. He said that "liberal" had become a dirty word in America and he'd like to change that. Fair enough. But you're never going to do so as long as your squeamishness about the projection of American power outweighs your do-gooder instincts.

The American Prospect's Mark Leon Goldberg penned an almost comically agonised piece fretting about the circumstances in which he'd be prepared to support a Bush intervention in Darfur: Who needs the Janjaweed when you're prepared to torture your own arguments the way Goldberg does? He gets to the penultimate paragraph and he's still saying stuff like: "The question, of course, is whether the US seeks Security Council support to legitimise such airstrikes."

Well, no, that's not the question. If you think the case for intervention in Darfur depends on whether or not the Chinese guy raises his hand, sorry, you're not being serious. The good people of Darfur have been entrusted to the legitimacy of the UN for more than two years and it's killing them. In 2004, after months of expressing deep concern, grave concern, deep concern over the graves and deep grave concern over whether the graves were deep enough, Kofi Annan took decisive action and appointed a UN committee to look into what's going on. Eventually, they reported back that it's not genocide.

Thank goodness for that. Because, as yet another Kofi-appointed UN committee boldly declared, "genocide anywhere is a threat to the security of all and should never be tolerated". So fortunately what's going on in the Sudan isn't genocide. Instead, it's just hundreds of thousands of corpses who happen to be from the same ethnic group, which means the UN can go on tolerating it until everyone's dead, at which point the so-called "decent left" can support a "multinational" force under the auspices of the Arab League going in to ensure the corpses don't pollute the water supply.

What's the quintessential leftist cause? It's the one you see on a gazillion bumper stickers: Free Tibet. Every college in the US has a Free Tibet society: There's the Indiana University Students for a Free Tibet, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Students for a Free Tibet, and the Students for a Free Tibet University of Michigan Chapter. Everyone's for a free Tibet, but no one's for freeing Tibet. Idealism as inertia is the hallmark of the movement.

Those of us on the Free Iraq-Free Darfur side are consistent: There are no bad reasons to clobber thug regimes, and the postmodern sovereignty beloved by the UN is strictly conditional. At some point, the Left has to decide whether it stands for anything other than self-congratulatory passivity and the fetishisation of a failed and corrupt transnationalism. As Alexander Downer put it: "Outcomes are more important than blind faith in the principles of non-intervention, sovereignty and multilateralism."

Just so. Regrettably, the Australian Foreign Minister isn't as big a star as George Clooney, but I'm sure Mr Downer wouldn't mind if the Hollywood elite wanted to appropriate it as the Clooney Doctrine. If Anglosphere action isn't multinational enough for Sudan, it might confirm the suspicion that the Left's conscience is now just some tedious shell game in which it frantically scrambles the thimbles but, whether you look under the Iraqi or Afghan or Sudanese one, you somehow never find the shrivelled pea of The Military Intervention We're Willing To Support When It Counts.