A robber who kills a clerk in a liquor store holdup in Texas stands a better chance of being tried, convicted and executed than a head of state who murders thousands, perhaps millions, of innocents on account of their race, ethnicity, religion or ideology.

As Texas governor, George W. Bush helped perpetuate the Lone Star State’s harsh brand of justice, and permited 145 executions in six years. Yet, as U.S. president, Bush is soft on a band of butchers halfway around the globe in Africa’s Darfur region. To be fair, President Bush did not invent the hypocritical policy of enforcing law-and-order at home while tolerating brutal criminality abroad. Unfortunately, it is a long tradition in international politics.

To understand this paradox, one must grasp the nature of “realpolitik,” the cynical art of statecraft. While nations are quick to condemn violations of human rights, few are willing to undertake the measures necessary to stop mass political murder. Military force is often the only way to block genocide, since neither moral exhortation nor sanctions seem to work. However, while many countries are ready to battle to protect their national interests, few are prepared to fight selflessly for civilian victims of violence in other sovereignties. Great risks are often associated with military intervention for humanitarian purposes, as shown by the 1992 fiasco in Somalia (dramatized in the movie “Black Hawk Down”). There may also be diplomatic advantage to maintaining a cozy relationship with the victimizer.

A case in point is Saddam Hussein, who was an ally and recipient of U.S. assistance in the 1980s, when Iraq was waging a ferocious eight-year war with Iran, then America’s archenemy in the region. Hussein later overstepped his bounds, turning the United States against him. His invasion of oil-rich Kuwait in 1990 led to his humiliating defeat by an American-led coalition assembled by President Bush’s father in the first Gulf War. His cheeky defiance of the United States, not to mention his impertinent plot to assassinate the elder Bush, led to the overthrow of his regime by an American invasion in the current war and his subsequent capture and imprisonment. U.S. desire to protect innocent Iraqis from Hussein’s oppression, torture and murder was not a prime motivation for either war.

On Nov. 5, following a long trial, an Iraqi court sentenced Hussein to hang for his role in the 1982 reprisal killings of 148 Shiites in the city of Dujail. It was only the tip of the iceberg. Hussein is believed to have ordered genocidal campaigns that killed as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1988 and more than 100,000 Shiites in 1991, for which he has yet to be tried. Still, he would never have been tried had he not crossed the U.S. in matters of state.

Hussein’s conviction is presently under appeal. If executed, he will join an exclusive club, whose members have actually paid any price for their genocide. Architects and functionaries of the Nazi “final solution” – who gassed, shot and starved about 12 million in a fanatical campaign of “racial extermination” between 1941 and 1945 – were tried and executed or jailed after World War II. Thousands of Hutu extremists, who slaughtered between 800,000 and 1 million Rwandans in 1994, have also been tried and punished.

Yet the shameful fact is most practitioners of genocide have either died, or will die, peacefully. Such villains include: Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin (who caused the death of more than 10 million through political executions, forced resettlement and “gulag” imprisonment in the 1930s – 1950s), former Khmer Rouge Communist leaders of Cambodia (who eliminated an estimated 1.7 million between 1975 and 1979 in an ideological witch hunt), one-time Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (who murdered about 300,000 from 1971 to 1979 in persecuting ethnic and religious minorities), and the late Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic (who displaced hundreds of thousands of Bosnian and Albanian Muslims and killed thousands of others in “ethnic cleansing” campaigns between 1992 and 1999).

Which brings us to Darfur, the western region of Sudan and the site of the latest dark saga of politically sanctioned mass murder. President Omar al-Bashir, the Muslim leader of Sudan, has orchestrated the destruction of villages, rape and indiscriminate killing among the largely non-Muslim, black African inhabitants of the region as payback for their rebellion against the Khartoum government in 2003. Using the Sudanese Army as well as Islamic militias – known as “janjaweed” – al-Bashir has ignored international condemnation and the threat of UN sanctions to perpetuate a campaign in which more than 200,000 men, women and children have died and two million others have fled to refugee camps along Sudan’s border.

President Bush has denounced the killings, labeling them as genocide, but has taken no serious action to stop them. The UN cannot send peacekeeping troops to Darfur, because Khartoum will not invite them in. The U.S., which blithely ignored UN wishes in launching an invasion of Iraq in 2003, seems content to abide by diplomatic niceties in Sudan’s case, undoubtedly for reasons of realpolitik.

It seems unlikely that al-Bashir or his associates will ever see the inside of a courtroom, let alone a hangman’s noose, as justice for their heinous crimes. Unless, of course, they rob a liquor store in Texas.