Brown’s Darfur triumph is also his test

Those who have exchanged fierce views on the invasion of Iraq have a fresh challenge this week: how to react to the UN resolution, tabled by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy with support from George W. Bush, to send 19,000 peacekeeping troops to the Darfur region of western Sudan. This is one deployment of foreign troops, we trust, of which all but the most ardent pacifist or isolationist will approve. Over the past four years 200,000 Sudanese have keen killed in rebel fighting and a further two million turned into refugees. If this is not a humanitarian disaster on a scale which justifies international intervention, it would be difficult to conceive of one which did.

The abject failure of the Coalition to plan for reconstruction in Iraq has been a gift to those who claimed that the UN’s failure to agree a second resolution mandating the invasion was justified. Yet the UN’s total inability to enforce its will upon Saddam Hussein was one of many reasons why Mr Bush and Tony Blair, surveying the new landscape after 9/11, decided that enough was enough.