A typically splenetic piece from Simon Jenkins today rails against the Western world’s failure to stand by previously championed ideals of ‘humanitarian intervention’.

His argument runs that the USA has had its fingers badly burnt by Iraq/Afghanistan and will withdraw from those places in due course. Without American leadership there can be no serious humanitarian intervention round the planet:

So where does that leave our old friend, humanitarian intervention? The concept was certainly oversold. In Lebanon, Kosovo, Somalia and Haiti it was heavily media-inspired and left the underlying cause of catastrophe unresolved. It failed the Kantian test of moral deterrence, that it must be seen as universally applicable. The West simply cannot appear with guns at the ready at every scene of human tragedy. As for deterrence, that has always been a game for armchair strategists. Did Kosovo deter the Burmese generals, or Lebanon the Somalian warlords?

It may be that there is nothing we can do about the horrors of Darfur, Burma or Zimbabwe, or nothing that could make their plight any better. It may indeed be wiser to sit on our hands and leave it to our leaders to emit occasional howls of impotent contempt, like the Foreign Office’s postimperial lament that some or other part of the world is “unacceptable”.

Yet I am sure that the concept of humanitarian intervention, however limited, was sound. Willing coalitions should be able to enforce the relief of suffering where relief is feasible, as was surely the case in Burma. For the time being, the blood-soaked gutters of Baghdad and the poppy fields of Helmand have taken their toll. They have rendered the entire concept of intervention defunct. It will take decades to recover.

Really? Decades?

Try months. Would we really see President Obama doing nothing in some of these cases?

So much tendentiousness, such a small article.

What is missing here is some idea of what any reasonable post-intervention end-state might look like – how in practice and principle alike an intervention ‘resolves the underlying cause of catastrophe’.

The Kosovo intervention may or may not have passed the ‘Kantian test of moral deterrence’ (Note: not a test much in the minds of the Western governments trying to restore hundreds of thousands of Kosovo people to their homes, as was accomplished), but it has set in motion a quite new quality of historical process in that area.

Elsewhere the picture is mixed, not least because any Western attempt to sort out any problem leads to howls of rage from different parts of the political spectrum, which means that an element of tentativeness/uncertainty creeps in, to immediately damaging effect.

Imagine an Iraq which had had the Surge right from the start, and where we had told Iran that for every attack in Iraq caused by Iranian subversion we would blow up one of their oil supply installations. Although even the confused Iraq intervention achieved one momentous Jenkinsian/Kantian deterrent outcome, namely the renouncing by Libya of weapons of mass destruction.

Intervening in a conflict is far easier if you go in hard, to ensure that one side wins an emphatic victory, thereby creating some sort of plausible stability for the foreseeable future. But that requires Will and a certain Ruthlessness.

All this is not popular these days. So instead we end up intervening to stop fighting by non-judgementally freezing a conflict and ploughing in humanitarian assistance to try to bribe people to stay peaceful.

Goes down well back home. But maybe it simply gives the warring sides a handy breathing-space of a few years. The war stops. It does not end.

Post-conflict end-states are tricky. But intervening in eg Burma to help people being brutalised by their own government after a cyclone is far easier. Just do it.

Simply tell the Burmese authorities that if they attempt to attack Allied assistance deliveries all their army and police equipment will be blown up, then get on with delivering assistance after blowing up part of the Burma airforce to show you mean it.

Restore Burmese cyclone victims to their pre-cyclone levels of misery and oppression. Then go home.

Deterrent effect? Of truly Kantian proportions.

In Zimbabwe’s case, I asked a Labour Cabinet Minister a few years back – as Mugabe’s lunatic policies got going – what was going to happen. I said that a surgical military intervention to topple the regime there could save thousands of lives and avoid the UK taxpayer having to fork out vast sums for ineffective new ‘assistance;’ as and when the agony ended.

Was it not moral and wise to weigh in quickly, and immoral/unwise to dither?

"I agree," came the reply. "But we’ll never get political support for it…"

So we dithered.

Zimbabwe’s options now are far worse.

Thousands of Africans die because our leaders campaign for office proclaiming that they will take a principled stand against the world’s villains, but when elected they fret far more about their own political base, which in turn is wound up because the likes of Simon Jenkins get well paid stridently to denounce leaders for intervening, then stridently denounce them for not intervening.

We bang on about the cost of intervening. What is the cost of not intervening?

A wicked Global Village indeed.