George Clooney courtesy Michael Vlasaty (CC 2.0)

Hollywood activists lend their names and time to a wide range of causes.  From radical partisan to childishly silly.  George Clooney has had his share of the silly (that’s often the most popular and safest), but he’s also been fighting a lonely battle in long troubled-Sudan in general and Dafur province in particular, where it’s serious, lonely and gutsy.

Clooney and another activist wrote a Washington Post Op-Ed warning of the on-going genocide that’s ready to overflow into something even more blood-curtling where it will become very expensive for the U.S.

Sudan is a fourth-world anti-country where everyday life ranges from mere unrest to the inner circle of hell.  The battle used to be between north and south Sudan, but now it’s the western province of Darfur, where government and state-sponsored militias murder civilians and outside humanitarian workers, in the most creative ways.

In 2004, then Secretary of State Colin Powell said the conflict in Darfur was genocide (murder by ethnicity), but the U.N. wouldn’t make the stretch since it would be forced to intervene.  The same thing happened in Rwanda in 1994 when one tribe tried to extinguish the other, but the U.N. never used the word genocide and just walked away.

Clooney is trying to get some traction to avoid another civilian massacre and save America from spending treasure after the fact.

Much of the media malaise has to do with religion (Sudan is 70% Muslim, 5% Christian), racial (indigenous African tribalism, no matter the death toll isn’t apparently newsworthy), and realpolitik-touchy (China is a supporter of the government).

Clooney is trying to get the U.S. to do something to assist a January Sudanese election that just might avert a new bloodbath.  He said that he talked to President Obama and “found him in command of the facts and seized with the urgency of the moment.”

If we were cynical we might predict that nothing again will be done.  President Clinton didn’t intervene in the Rwanda genocide either.