Anybody want to bet which country'll be next to get a taste of the American military? For centuries, even when the Brits were more-or less ruling it, Sudan has been a dungheap with various ethnic and religious groups dominating, enslaving, or killing one another. The United Nations is really generating the headlines with it's threats of "STOP THAT, OR....WE'LL SAY STOP THAT AGAIN!"

It's pretty safe to say that few, if any, world governments are willing to militarily engage "The Sudan" in order to stop the genocide and slavery that's going on. One recent European Union report states that there is no genocide in Sudan, but it all depends on what the definition of "is" is....um, I mean "genocide".

• At the same time, further qualified backing has come unexpectedly from a European Union fact-finding mission. This team has concluded that there is no evidence to say that what has happened in Sudan’s troubled western province is genocide. The investigators then go on to define genocide as the planned extermination of one people by another. Their report concludes, however, that there have been widespread attacks and tens of thousands of murders prompted by racial prejudice. Though the Darfur refugees cowering in refugee camps on either side of the Chad-Sudan border may not appreciate the distinction between genocide and racial murders, that distinction is important for the rest of the world.

During my time in Saudi, I, personally, saw that Sudanese slaves are still owned by (at least one) Saudi family, and almost daily I read accounts in various news sources ( especially the BBC, and ArabNews---aka, the green gospel) accounts of atrocities in Sudan. For anyone who thinks racism is bad in the United States, you've seen nothing until you travel in the Middle East, even counting the states with the highest percentage of "racial hate crimes":

• The five states with the highest numbers of hate crime were: California (1,648 incidents, 22.1% of total reported incidents), New York (693, 9.3%), New Jersey (570, 7.6%), Massachusetts (430, 5.8%), and Michigan (416, 5.6%). These five states comprise 44.7% of all incidents reported in the United States.

The current media coverage reminds me of the gear-up for the Yugoslavian adventure of the previous decade, and I believe that our boys (and unfortunately, our girls) are going to end up slogging through Sudan before too long. I hope that my prediction is wrong.