As I was completing this essay, I experienced one of those random moments that make my supposed profession worthwhile. I had been invited for a Foggy Bottom chat with Amb. Richard Boucher, the State Department’s chief spokesman. He took me deftly over and around the various hurdles involved in any Colin Powell retrospect, and demonstrated the diplomatic adroitness that has endeared him to so many correspondents, and seemed almost to smooth away much of the jaggedness. And then we got to Darfur.

Boucher began a practiced response, speaking about “process” and bargaining and about pipelines of food and medicine and all of that, especially stressing the horrible fate of those herders and villagers who had been “caught in the middle.” I like to think that he saw the question forming on my lips, but, before I could get any further, he suddenly underwent a complete change of expression. “Actually,” he said, as if half-talking to himself, “they aren’t ‘caught in the middle.’ There is no middle. No middle to be caught in. The word ‘middle’ doesn’t apply.” After a short pause I asked if that had been, or could now be, for the record. He said “yeah.”

This was a useful tip-off to the content of Secretary Powell’s testimony on Capitol Hill about a week later, when he broke with the cautious language that some had been employing and stated in more-or-less round terms that the conduct of the racist Arab-Muslim death squads in Darfur conformed to the definition of genocide. It is always encouraging when the department shakes off the dusty euphemisms that make up the small change of diplomatic habit. Taken together with the focus he has developed on the AIDS catastrophe now menacing...