I am at sea about Matthew Yglesias' reading of Mark Helprin's Times op-ed entitled "Make Sudan an Offer It Can't Refuse."

Yglesias characterizes Helprin's piece as "let's bomb Sudan and everyone who doesn't want to do so immediately is obviously complicit in genocide in Darfur." He takes his cue from a post by Mark Goldberg at UN Dispatch, but seems to have missed Goldberg's point as well.

Helprin's piece -- which does largely advocate for a bombing campaign or at least the articulated threat of a bombing campaign to make Khartoum do something to end the genocide -- is, as Goldberg indicates, wrong for the situation on the ground today. It doesn't, however, sound like Helprin is pointedly attacking the UN. He nastily characterizes the Africa Union troops -- undermanned, underfunded, friendless as it is -- as "a camping trip to the tower of Babel," but it's true that they are a product of an system that has left Darfur in such an international peacekeeping no-man's-land. Few of us would defend the way the international community has handled Darfur.

The bigger danger, of course, is that failures like these -- in Darfur, in Haiti, and on and on -- are exploited for the purposes Yglesias sees in Helprin's piece. "The UN couldn't end a genocide that the whole world agrees is an abomination. Let's bolt," is a common trope of opponents of international organizations. But in this case, Helprin seems misinformed rather than malicious.