berals seeking to intervene for strictly moral reasons. We also now know how different intervention looks when we help forces who want to be helped. East Timor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Libya — all cases where force evened out odds between a brutal government and a widespread and legitimate social or nati

of 1994 and over the many years of dithering as lives were lost in the Balkans. But a series of apparently successful interventions - Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Sierra Leone - gradually strengthened the belief that western military power could be used to end conflicts and save civilians. The bitter experienc