Ken Silverstein is, for my money—or time, as the case may be—one of the best D.C. journalists working today. A rarity in the blogosphere, his “Washington Babylon” at Harper’s regularly provides original reporting along with the standard interesting commentary. Yesterday Silverstein put up an important post on “Facts and Darfur,” touching on an issue that has animated American campuses more than perhaps any other in recent years. Even amid the heady successes of the campus-based divestment campaigns, it seems like a lot of us, myself included, knew very little about what was going on in Sudan beyond the stray terms like “genocide” and “Janjaweed.” I’ve tried to educate myself about Darfur. But I have to admit I’ve always regarded those campaigns with a measure of skepticism. One simple reason:

Wouldn’t it make a whole lot more sense for American students to organize around issues they can affect most directly — that is to say, American policies that are doing great harm in the world? Then again, there are many worthy causes out there and I’m not one to pooh-pooh activists’ choices. I’m not yet cynical enough to accept one critic’s assessment that “‘Save Darfur’ activism ... has not really been about Darfur. Rather, it has been about creating a new moralistic and simplistic generational mission for campaigners and journalists in America and Europe.” But I can see his point.

There’s another problem here. Those familiar terms, “genocide” especially, tend to suck the air out of a room and mark the end, rather than the beginning, of a conversation. They obscure the fact that the situation in Darfur is, on closer inspection, complicated and resistant to simple solutions. For one thing, as Silverstein points out, it’s not a pure case of Good vs. Evil (or Arab vs. African, or Muslim vs. Christian). This unsurprising fact was driven home recently by the news that Darfuri rebels allegedly killed 10 African Union peacekeepers (though this is now being contested). Then there’s the narrative of the energetic Save Darfur coalition, which, Silverstein explains, “has claimed in ads that as many as 400,000 civilians have been killed in Darfur, saying on its website that this results from a ‘scorched-earth campaign by the Sudanese government against Darfuri civilians.’” No one disputes that the Sudanese government has an abysmal human rights record. But what’s closer to the truth, one of Silverstein’s experts estimates, is 200,000 deaths, one-quarter from direct military attacks and the rest from man-made humanitarian disaster. As for how the U.S. or the U.N. should respond to the conflict, there is — again, unsurprisingly — no magic wand solution. Some accuse Save Darfur of being overzealous. One aid group director said that some of its policy prescriptions (UN intervention or a no-fly zone are cited) “would set into motion a series of events that could easily result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of individuals.”

I don’t pretend to possess good answers about how students should respond to the conflict in Sudan. But I do know we would all benefit from more reading and some closer study on the issue — free of exaggeration and distortion, in all its stubborn, messy complexity.

Finally, I’ll lift the quote with which Silverstein closes his piece:

“[E]ven with the best intentions in the world, campaigners find themselves hoist on the petard of their own hyperbole,” David Rieff wrote in an op-ed in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, one of the few critical looks at the advocacy movement for Darfur. “None of this is to say that the crisis in Darfur is manufactured. It is all too real. But a crisis that involves innocent victims and evil victimizers is different from one in which there is evil enough to go around.”