How do you measure a tragedy?

What makes one tragedy worse than another — how do you even measure it? Is it the number of people dead? Who they were? Where they were from? How they died? Do we call in a forensics team for us to argue over whose death was the most gruesome? Nope. But though these questions can’t even be answered humanely, we answer them anyway every day.

We watch news networks that decide which tragedies deserve press coverage and which ones don’t, often screening them with explicit racism. The tragedy of the 4,000-plus American casualties in Iraq overshadows the deaths of 100,000 faceless Iraqis. The British girl who is terminally ill is more important than the one African child who dies of AIDS every 15 minutes. It seems like some human lives are just more valuable than others.

It isn’t very different when it comes to deciding on which charity to give to. Which one deserves your money: the cancer research fund or the public school? A village well or an animal shelter? Are some charities more worthy than others? It’s hard to say, but we have to make a choice anyway.

Governments face the same dilemma. The world turns to rich countries to solve its problems. But no country can afford to solve all of them, so they inevitably have to say “No” to worthy causes like fighting poverty, terrorism, human rights abuses and global warming. Likewise, they have to choose between rescuing one screwed-up country over another.

You can imagine how such deliberations go. White men dressed in suits, playing God, with the power to save millions of people yet the burden of having to choose among them. What would the criteria for a tragedy include? How many people killed? The color of their skin? Their passports? Or, as is often the case, the resources under the ground? That was evidently the case for America in 2003.

Imagine that you’re the most powerful man in the world and you can get rid of any dictator you want — and, boy, there a lot to choose from! There’s the usual suspects: Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il, Myanmar’s General Than Shwe. Or maybe someone less obvious like Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko from Belarus. Why not?

There were no right answers. So when the decision finally came, it wasn’t decided by the number of innocent civilians killed or the severity of human rights abuses. Instead, America chose to sack Saddam Hussein — who deserved to be sacked anyway — but for a practical reason: Iraq was sitting on more than a 100 billion barrels worth of oil.

In a way, it seemed justified. This was a dilemma with no right, no wrong. Any answer would do. And if you were to save someone from a burning building anyway, it might as well have been the guy who could pay up, right?

Wrong, say the humanitarians. Intentions matter. So goes the crux of the movement against the Iraq War: neither political nor economic interests should have influenced the invasion. The fact that they did made it an unjust war.

And maybe it was also unjust for another reason. Maybe another country was more deserving of “rescue”? It’s often difficult to declare one tragedy to be worse than another, but in some cases the differences are clear. Maybe the choice in the burning building is between saving one man or a whole family?

Everyone has heard about the genocide in Darfur, the western region of Sudan where local militias have been pillaging villages since 2001 and the death toll has risen to up to 250,000. The problem is that “genocide” is a misnomer. America is the only country in the world that views the events in Darfur as genocide. What’s actually happening is a civil war between anti-government rebels and pro-government militias.

Yes, it’s a tragedy that should be prevented. But in Africa, civil wars are more common than free and fair elections. The conflict isn’t genocide (even according to the UN), and — as wrong as this sounds — neither is it a particularly bad civil war by African standards. Sudan’s southern neighbor is the Congo, a country also suffering from civil war — one where more than five million people have died in the bloodiest conflict since World War II. Meanwhile, to the east is Somalia, a country that has been in a state of anarchy since 1991. The situation there today is even worse than it was in the movie, Black Hawk Down. If America were guided by purely humanitarian reasons, then these countries would be on the agenda, too, probably ahead of Sudan.

Belittling the tragedy of Darfur seems wrong, but that’s what choosing between tragedies entails. The Congo’s death toll is easily 20 times that of Sudan’s. And aside from making billions of dollars from oil exports to China, Sudan is lucky to even have a government. Somalia is too unstable to have one.

So if Sudan’s neighbors are in a situation as bad, if not worse than Sudan’s, why has America been pushing the UN to isolate Sudan, throw its president in jail and invade the country? It has lots and lots of oil (along with uranium, possibly gold) and various lobbyists have also spent millions of dollars to put Darfur on the agenda. Economic and political reasons have bumped Sudan up on America’s list of priorities in Africa.

There’s no doubt that Darfur deserves to be rescued from the ongoing bloodshed. But the Congo and Somalia probably deserve it even more. It might seem wrong to measure tragedies and death tolls up against each other, but that’s what choosing does anyway. Choosing a single tragedy or a cause implicitly belittles the other ones, which is what many are doing to the grossly neglected cases of the Congo and Somalia. A humanitarian world should pay attention to these countries instead. But still, being forced to choose who to save in a burning building just doesn’t sound right. It’s an inhumane dilemma. Ultimately, it’s obvious that the right thing for any powerful nation — or similarly, a rich individual — to do wouldn’t be to have to choose, but to save everyone, to tick “all of the above,” no matter the cost!

I know. That doesn’t sound quite right either.