An interesting article from the NYT's Adam Nossiter on how, with Obama now in the White House, the Guinean junta is wary of getting on the wrong side of the U.S.:

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror

By Mahmood Mamdani

(Pantheon, 398 pp., $26.95)

The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All

By Gareth Evans

(Brookings, 349 pp., $24.95)

I.

In the summer of 2007 , Mahmood Mamdani found himself at a meeting of activists and politicians, listening to sentiments that had by then become quite common among a certain class of politically active Americans. The speakers were calling on the United Nations to send peacekeepers to Darfur. Fed up with the inability of African Union troops--who were already on the ground in western Sudan--to stop the ongoing bloodshed, they insisted that U.N. forces could do better. The United Nations, explained one politician, echoing a view you could have heard on any number of college campuses at the time, would grant "mercy" to the people of Darfur.

Regarding the nomination of Bernard Kouchner to head France's Ministry of Foreign Affiars, I think first of France, of the image she has of herself, then what she shows the world. The arrival of Kouchner--this great Frenchman, respected everywhere, the man who invented Médecins sans frontières (Doctors without Borders) and Médecins du monde (Doctors of the World), the famous "French Doctors"--at the Quai d'Orsay is obviously good news.