The first recipient of the long awaited report from the United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on the killings that the government of Sudan and the Arab militias known as the Janjaweed have been perpetrating at Darfur was – you guessed it – the government in Khartoum. It was given an advance copy by U.N. officials. So the first the world learned about the content of the report was from the Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail. Smugly announced he: “We have a copy of that report and they didn’t say there is a genocide.”

Giving Khartoum’s killers an opportunity to spin the report is just one reminder of why doing things the U.N.’s way doesn’t work with a government willing to throw out the rules to achieve its objectives. Tens of thousands of persons have been killed and close to 2 million displaced, but the U.N., in its 177-page report, could not bring itself to call the killings “genocide.” It did recommend that the perpetrators of the killing be brought to justice. So the debate in the corridors of the U.N. and in the world’s newspapers has moved from the fact of Khartoum’s killing campaign to whether the International Criminal Court should have jurisdiction.

While the time-eating debate takes place over what venue of justice should be used to try to encourage the killers to stop killing, the people being murdered are just as dead, whether or not the U.N. reckons it’s genocide. The remaining Darfurians are huddled in camps, just as vulnerable to ongoing raids as they were before the U.N. managed to issue a report. So we have a new prism through which to view the U.N.’s failure. George Bush has given an inaugural and now a State of the Union address in which liberty has taken the place of honor. That place of honor no longer must go to sovereignty for dictatorial, murderous regimes or to lawyers playing rock/paper/scissors over the meaning of “genocide” or forms of international justice.

Certainly the people of Darfur understand the difference between those who are seriously concerned about their most basic freedom – to survive – and those for whom survival instead means extending the pretense that the U.N. can or will come to the aid of the world’s most beleaguered peoples. Senator Brownback, Republican of Kansas, thinks Secretary-General Annan should resign for the U.N.’s passivity as Darfur burns. That step is overdue, if unlikely. He is off the field. And it is past time for freedom-loving nations of the world eager to stop the killing in Darfur to start thinking, as they did in Iraq, how to rescue the situation without the help of the world body.