This is an all too familiar scene when we look back at the genocide that took place in both Bosnia and Rwanda. Those times, we waited until a great deal innocent lives had been lost before we decided to get involved. We realized that had we acted sooner, many lives could have been saved. The rest of the world greatly regretted waiting as long as we did to take action in these two situations. However, once we did take action, we ended up saving countless lives with our intervention tactics. It would be a great shame if we didn't take what we learned from our past experiences and applied them here. Hopefully something will be done before more lives are lost.

Every day it seems this crisis in Darfur is becoming more and more prominent in the public eye. The civil war, if you will, started over three years ago and was prompted by the Sudanese government with the help of Janjaweed militia. Since that time, over 200,000 people have been reportedly killed and over 2.5 million forced out of their homes into refugee camps. Once a person is in a camp, they are still not safe. Let me paint this gruesome picture of reality for you: throughout the day, hundreds and thousands of women and young girls are raped and beaten for most of the men are killed right away; there is no way for these people to acquire any food or drink so they are dying of starvation. The African Union force, barley armed with more than their bravery, have done their best to protect the people in these camps from the slaughtering of the militia. But these forces have been told, by they Sudanese government, to stop defending these helpless people. In turn, millions of unarmed people will be executed.

With political tensions running high both at home and abroad and people still questioning the war in Iraq; its no wonder that we find ourselves leery to get involved elsewhere in the world. But with the situation in Darfur becoming what it has I don't see how we can stand by and watch more innocent people get killed by the thousands. A letter was written by Bob Dole and John McCain in hopes to get more people, both inside and out of the political word, involved in this tragedy.

Could it be? An issue that trancends partisan squabbling? Well according to James Giguere there's at least one topic of discussion that has done that, you can read his comments here