Today's Boston Globe editorial, "Ending the Darfur Silence," focused on the genocide in the Darfur section of Sudan. While forceful in its argument that this is an international humanitarian disaster, it is hypocritical and almost weasily in the way it skirts the main solution to the problem.

The editorial describes the main perpetrators of this atrocity as the National Islamic Front and their main military wing known as the Janjaweed Arab militia. It bemoans the fact that over 400,000 people have been murdered and another 2 million people have been displaced from their homes.

The piece mentions a rally of private citizens converging on Washington D.C. at which human rights activists and scholars will meet at the Holocaust museum to watch a film on Darfur. It goes on to say that the "spirit of the rally is captured in a quote from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

Well with all due respect to the Rev. King and to the Globe editorial staff, talk is cheap. Talk and film watching will do nothing to solve this problem. It is action that is required in the Sudan to end this tragedy. That action would involved military intervention to stop the genocide and the placement of U.N. peace keeping forces in the region to keep it from re—occurring.

Inevitably the bulk of the manpower and expense of such an action would likely be born by the United States. This would be just the type of injection of American military might that the Globe and the leftists at the parent New York Times so frequently rails against.

The Globe laments the lack of action by the Bush administration and others and criticizes them for making convenient excuses, yet they cannot bring themselves to print the words or propose that direct, forceful and decisive action be taken to stop the murder. The brilliant strategists at the Globe suggest that moral and political pressure must be brought to bear on world governments.

World governments are not committing this genocide. Pressure and talk will not bring the parties to a negotiated peace. Overwhelming force and punishment against the main aggressor is the only tried and true method that will stop this behavior.

If the Globe is concerned about stopping genocide then the editorial brain trust at the paper should have the guts to call for a realistic solution. A decent news story might report how many troops are involved in this aggression and how much time, effort and military resources would need to be marshaled by the U.N. and the United States to end this tragedy. The Globe never seems to be at a loss to find experts to criticize Rumsfeld's war making ability, perhaps they could find one to advise him on Darfur. Some how I don't see that story making the front page.

Phil Gallagher lives near Boston.