The classic African plight

■"Despite Pact, New Violence Stymies Aid in Sudan," by Somini Sengupta, New York Times, 27 November 2004, p. A1.

The story you know: Sudan is imploding with internal violence and nobody seems able to do anything about it. Europe stands idle, the U.S. is too busy elsewhere, the UN does nothing (in keeping with its charter of complete impotence), the New Core powers like Russia and China havenít been brought on board in any significant strategic sense so they block what meager procedural moves we do try in the UN, the African Union is there in force (all 1,000 troops armed with notebooks and cameras), and now we reach the CNN moment where tens of thousands will start starving while food aid sits piled up in local warehouses.

Everyone wants this problem to go away and for what little oil there is to flow, but we donít have a working system to deal with this sort of ìinternalî problem that effectively defines the Gap. And until we get that A-to-Z system for processing politically-bankrupt states there, there will be no shrinking that Gap.