Once more the globe-trotting peace missionary, Jimmy Carter, has surprised the diplomats. Last week he went to Sudan, where a bloody conflict has long seemed less a civil war than an exercise in mutual extermination, and emerged with the promise of a two-month cease-fire.
This Carter achievement seemed particularly startling. For a dozen years, the Muslim Sudanese government in the north and the south's black Christian and animist rebels have tried to kill as many people on the other side as possible by deliberate starvation and by bombs and bullets. Between them they have snuffed out more than 1.3 million lives....