Darfur

All decent people, in my experience, know that the West ought to take military action against the government of Sudan in order to halt the killings in Darfur. Unfortunately, to the best of my (admittedly limited) ability to figure out, such an intervention would actually be a very bad idea. See Alex de Waal and Brad Plumer on this. The fact that intervention advocates like Eric Reeves seem to mostly be assuming that an intervention force wouldn't actually need to fight -- i.e., that the Sudanese would surrender -- strikes me as cause for concern; a classic instance of best-case scenario planning.