If you've spent too much of the last ten years, as I have, reading Simon Jenkins and others of his cast of mind, who when they hear the word 'intervention' reach for their pens or laptops to write about the follies of ever trying to save anybody from the regimes which torture, terrorize and murder them, you might like to try this column by Brendan Simms for a refreshing contrast. Simms traces the way in which the 'realist' failure of policy that led to the massacre in Srebrenica in 1995 produced the change in thinking behind David Cameron's initiative for intervention in Libya.
In his Principles of Political Economy J.S. Mill observed that it was unsound to compare one economic system in its putatively ideal form with another system bearing all its present flaws - and ignoring the latter's potential for also being improved in the light of ideal principles. That's a bit like the Jenkins-et-al comparative method with regard to liberal intervention: they note the difficulties and failures when an intervention has taken place, while appealing implicitly to an ideal of no-cost or low-cost non-intervention. Simms's article reminds us what real non-intervention can look like.