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Published on August 7, 2007

The barbarism outsourced to militias by Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, has claimed more than 200,000 lives over four years bookmarked with peace deals never honoured, resolutions never enforced and promises never kept.

Now, finally, a UN and African Union force of 26,000 peacekeepers should be deployed from October 1. Its composition is uncertain and its timetable unclear, but it is a start. Gordon Brown, despite being hailed, implausibly, as the most important transatlantic emissary since Columbus, can take much credit.

True, he was lucky on timing. China was ready at last to put pressure on Sudan. The Chinese worried that their investment in Khartoum was imperilled by the unilateral US sanctions that have also made Bashir jumpy. Do not, though, expect him to be laying out a red carpet for the peacekeepers. More likely, their flights will be diverted and their supplies held up in the now-ritual snub to international will.

Should Bashir not co-operate, Downing Street warns he must be "under no illusion" about the consequences. Companies owned by his elite would be frozen out of international markets and his cronies debarred from Harley Street and the Rue Rivoli. And that would be just the start.

We shall see. Brown, with much to win or lose, is also being cautious. The success of the latest Security Council resolution will depend on the political process creaking into gear again. There is no quick end in prospect. The UN resolution is watered down and, though they hold a mandate to use force to protect civilians and aid workers, peacekeepers can only do so much to halt rape and slaughter.

But none of those caveats justifies an insidious pessimism that says the UN is worthless or that Darfur is the favourite cause of bleeding hearts. If so, thank goodness for them. I have spent a little time in Sudan and watched women, starved beyond hope or tears, holding babies with hours left to live. Such images are rarely seen. Bashir keeps the media well away and, even if he did not, what rattled cans for Ethiopia in 1984 and 1985 is now seen, by some, as bordering on aid pornography. We can argue about the semantics of genocide versus ethnic cleansing, but we shrink from the sight and sound and scent of death.

Brown is a visceral operator for whom suffering matters. His decisiveness over Darfur raises the wider question of how far he will go in pushing tough solutions, including military ones, to human meltdown in Africa and elsewhere.

It would, clearly, be madness to bomb Iran or attack Pakistan. But any idea that the West should sit by, bewailing its unlovely past and celebrating its newfound "realism", as villages are destroyed in Darfur or life expectancy in Zimbabwe plummets, is not a guarantee of a better world. It is the counsel of cowardice and despair.

Outside force is never to be lightly used. Mostly, it is wrong, or hopeless, or both. Even so, Sierra Leone worked, as did Kosovo. But, as hubris precedes nemesis, so botched interventions follow more successful ones. After the first Gulf War came Somalia, retreat, civil collapse and a new motto: "Leave well alone". That doctrine was applied to Rwanda, with the loss of at least half a million lives.

This timeline is charted by Paul Collier in his excellent book, "The Bottom Billion", about how to help the poorest people on earth. Collier argues that fast military intervention can, in rare cases, provide the best answer. This risky policy is worthless without the will to support and rebuild, but it should not be a liberal heresy. Even recent UN guidance says that, when a state utterly fails to protect its citizens, international action should trump sovereignty.

Brown is not averse to muscular solutions. In some ways, he is even keener on them than Tony Blair. This summer, he is pondering how the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo can be helped to support its beleaguered citizens. On Zimbabwe, where military intervention is not deemed feasible, he may be considering what leverage the leaders of proactive neighbours, coupled with targeted aid, may have in creating a country freed from the dead hand of Mugabe.

But will Brown also dare argue for last-ditch remedies, such as a European rapid-response force primed, with regional legitimacy, to avert future catastrophes when the UN proves too unwieldy or feeble? The morgues of modern history are filled not only with tyrants' victims but of those failed, in Srebrenica and elsewhere, by blue berets.

Already, Brown has shown some will for toughness. He cannot, though, be simultaneously a promoter of sinuous multilateralism and an old-style nationalist ratcheting up global risk. For now, he is trying to have it all. First, he must ditch Trident, and Parliament should kill off plans for unwieldy aircraft carriers, as well as the preposterous use of Menwith Hill for US missile defence. Then he should take a hard look at whether the Afghan war is any more winnable than the catastrophe that has left almost a third of Iraqis in need of emergency aid.

But, equally, others should abandon the deceitful nostrum that Iraq rules out all other intervention. Conflicts in which the West has political, economic and security stakes should never be conflated with humanitarian missions. Darfur analysts are fond of saying the war is complicated and they are right. But it is also very simple. Thousands have died not only for lack of governance and international will, but also for want of basic human impulses in a world that has allowed the Bashir regime to get away with murder.

Brown has, at the least, helped smash the criminal lassitude that masquerades as responsible politics and propelled Sudan out of the shadows. At last there is a glimmer of hope for Darfur. But never again should it take so long to do so very little.

Mary Riddell

The Observer