Looking back on history, it’s difficult to know where America stands on intervention. After the Holocaust, we promised “never again.”

Our record since has been less straightforward. President Clinton, for instance, called his inaction toward the Rwandan genocide — a slaughter of 800,000 people — a personal failure. During the race to succeed him, however, both candidates maintained their support for Clinton’s bystander approach, claiming they would have done the same. Nevertheless, President Bush has been an ardent advocate for Darfur, a conflict rife with complexities.

In the Balkans, Clinton backed the bombing of Serbian forces by NATO to stop the execution of Bosnian Muslims. Despite a death toll of more than 200,000, the effort there was a testament to our original vow. Our president-elect, meanwhile, has made genocide prevention a signature issue.

The humanitarian impulse to intervene in countries where violence runs rampant is a peculiarly American idea, argues Princeton professor Gary J. Bass. “Rather than recognizing the stark limitations of military power, Americans are promising again to remake the world,” he writes. “Infinitely distractible, the United States plunged into Iraq before it had stabilized Afghanistan; now, while both countries are still hanging by a thread, it may be on to Darfur. Humanitarian intervention, in short, seems to many a distinctively American idea — and not in a good way.”

Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani asks, “Why should an intervention in Darfur not turn out to be a trigger that escalates rather than reduces the level of violence as intervention in Iraq has done?”

Whether or not all this is true, there is no doubt our efforts have had mixed results. Moreover, our paradigm is marred by an unknown prejudice, be it a media bias or some social norm that directs us to one crisis but not another.

As Mamdani notes, “The most powerful mobilization in New York City is in relation of Darfur, not Iraq. One would expect the reverse, for no other reason than that most New Yorkers are American citizens and so should feel directly responsible for the violence in occupied Iraq. But Iraq is a messy place in the American imagination, a place with messy politics ... In contrast, there is nothing messy about Darfur. It is a place without history and without politics; simply a site where perpetrators clearly identifiable as ‘Arabs’ confront victims clearly identifiable as ‘Africans.’”

This breaks down the American perception of the conflict too simply, but the fact remains. Why Darfur and not some other place? Yes, Iraq is not a genocide, but some argue that Darfur is not one either. This is not to dismiss the violence there as acceptable; rather, it classifies the crisis as an attempt to “drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare,” as written by a Security Council-sanctioned commission. If you’re answer is numbers — a sheer body count — then we should turn south. In 2004, even before Tutsi Gen. Laurent Nkunda’s rebel forces entered the country, the violence in the Congo had claimed 3.8 million lives. Now, that number is even greater. In Darfur, the toll is probably somewhere under half a million.

Josef Stalin once said, “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.” We may not be able to digest these haunting numbers, but the analysis makes you pause.

What will president-elect Obama do when he assumes his role as leader of the free world? Where will his priorities lie and where, if he chooses, will we intervene? With an overstretched military, it is unlikely Obama will engage unilaterally with any perpetrators, but the world is still full of suffering people.

As Clinton once said, “If the horrors of the Holocaust taught us anything, it is the high cost of remaining silent and paralyzed in the face of genocide.” Obama will have a tough time keeping his mouth shut in a world where violence is raging in the Congo, Somalia, Darfur and a host of other countries.

“Never again” may have to wait until after the withdrawal.

Reach columnist Eric Shellan at opinion@dailyuw.com