In our world, it seems, there are the worthy victims and the unworthy ones. To get at the difference, consider the posture of the United States toward Sudan and Iraq. According to the Bush administration, Sudan is a “rogue state”; it is on the State Department’s list of “state sponsors of terrorism”. It stands accused of attacking the US through its role in the suicide-boat bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in 2000.

And then, of course – as Mahmood Mamdani pointed out in the London Review of Books recently – Darfur fits neatly into a narrative of “Muslim-on-Muslim violence”, of a “genocide perpetrated by Arabs”, a line of argument that appeals heavily to those who would like to change the subject from what the US has done – and is doing – in Iraq. Talking about US accountability for the deaths of the Iraqis the US supposedly liberated is a far less comfortable matter.

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