Muddied Waters

I was pleased when I first caught the headline that L.A. Congresswoman Maxine Waters is calling for a boycott of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It's not that I think Olympic boycotts do much to affect policy -- Jimmy Carter's boycotting of the Moscow 1980 games didn't exactly drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. But it was nice to see somebody point out the bleeding obvious fact that polite society has largely ignored: The host for the '08 games is a brutal tyranny that has no semblance of free speech, tramples human rights, terrorizes families, doesn't recognize religious freedom and -- on top of that -- sells us billions of dollars worth of poisonous junk.

But, it turns out, Waters' objection to China has nothing to do with China, per se, but its policies toward Sudan:

Waters and others involved in the effort to end the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, where an estimated 200,000 people have died and millions more are homeless, want to pressure China to curtail its support of the Sudanese government.

Sudan earned about $4 billion from oil sales last year, with 80 percent of that coming from China, according to Fortune magazine. Chinese firms also have helped build up the country's infrastructure, leading to an economic boom in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and China has stepped up arms sales to the strife-ravaged nation.

To be sure, Beijing's support of the Sudanese government is another item on its long list of horrors. But if we're going to condemn Beijing for supporting murderous regimes, shouldn't we first condemn it for being a murderous regime?