Forget for a second that Bush/Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld would be implementing any plan of action on the Darfur situation. Assuming a competent administration, but also that American forces are still substantially committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, what are the viable options in front of us as you see them?

I've thought about this a bit. Lets separate variables. The Janjaweed are the trouble; they operate with impunity.

If you look carefully you'll see their pulling most of their munitions from the black market, typical ak47 type armament. They've got some chinese munitions as well. Their momentum comes from how many different portable supplies they can roll out of each raid. They always salt the earth when they're gone, burn everything in sight.

Their transportation is largely by camel, they ride in hard to areas that are typically not on any arterial roads.  

Most of these villagers support by low grade agriculture, foraging and hunting in about a seven mile radius. In general, about 7 miles is what one man will walk in a day.

Given that, the raids are typically about 14 miles apart.

The geography if the land is fairly flat.

The cheapest solution in my book is this:
have the government subsidize cellular tower buildout in the hardest hit areas -
put coverage patterns into the seven mile zone where the hunters are located.  Two speed dials each hunter: their village, and airstrike.

A camel moves about 12 miles an hour, so to cover the last ground out of the forage zone, if a hunter spies the janjaweed charging in, would provide a 30 minute scramble.  Even a rusty f 14 tomcat could cover that ground with room to spare and strafe the entire raiding party at mile 3.

In the meantime, with an alert to the village, they lift up all their movable supplies and lockdown the water and other things the raiding party will need to take away to sustain.
And set booby traps.

They will be safe as they flee into the forest, the raiding party will not risk dispersing through  the forest to hunt them down.

Africa right now is experiencing a cellular boom. People pay for cellphones. Eventually the government will make their money back.

America can help by lending cellular expertise, and tech to get them going + it would be a simple appeal to lift tariff on export to darfur region
and with their oil money their credit rating should be decent enough.

Option 2: Hunt down the janjaweed. they leave a trail of ghamu kadda all the way across the desert. Track them with helicopters and gatling gun them in their tracks . Night vision and muffled apaches would work, when the camels spook it will make a star in the desert where the camps are - then drop a special forces out there to figure out if they are janjaweed. Once you get a lock on them give them a warning to surrender then just gatling gun them right there in the desert if they don't play ball.  

Option 3: Arm the villagers and train them as a militia

All of this is centered around that christian acronym of trying to figure out what the Janjaweed are doing, or... as I wear around my wrist..

WW T JJW D?

bi66er has it.

I'd suggest that statements like

We can stop this genocide, and we choose not to.

The plain fact is that, during the Cold War, there was a bright-line rule on the use of military force, topped off by the UN Charter.

Then, in 1999, genial Bill Clinton said We don't need no stinking Security Council and decided to bomb the crap out of Serbia.

At the time, the onanistic frenzy amongst lefties was wonderful to behold.

Coupla years later, along comes Bush - and he says Fuck the UN too.

Now, events may just have persuaded some in the regime that the old rules on use of force were a better deal than Bush's global Wild West.

Even if military intervention in the Sudan were possible - which it isn't - the last thing we want is confirmation that the UN system is finally dead, and Bushlaw rules.

Quick question: if the US is morally obliged to intervene militarily in Sudan, how come that same morality didn't apply to the Congo?

In whose recent wars the death toll has run to 3 to 4 million.

Could it be that mean considerations of practicality prevented it?

And those wars started during Clinton's presidency...

Try this for fun -

1. Find out the name of the janjaweed funders, e.g. maybe the govt. of  sudan, etc.

2. Drop the url in over here:
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowse r.html

See where it takes you.