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I neglected to mention that the UN, properly resourced and financed, WOULD be the best way to proceed.

None of my argument is invalidated by you invoking Hitler. His interventions in neighbouring countries were to enlarge the Reich, not improve the conditions of the inhabitants nor stabalise collapsing countries. I wouldn't suggest for a minute that his actions would come under the justiiable label.

As for the Vietnamese waiting a while, could I remind you they had just concluded a 30 year war and weren't probably in the best of states to go fighting Pol Pot. But they did in the end, rather than recognise the Khmer regime like the west did, that's what matters.

And I am well aware that despite the mad man at the top, Iraq was a very stable country with strong secularism and a lot of social measures, security and infrastructure in place that have been swept aside by the insanity of the invasion. As I made clear I do not consider the Iraq intervention as explained to us by our government to be justifiable, as its real purpose despite the rehtoric, was clearly to control the oil.

The absence of oil in Somalia and the Balkans, and no communist threat in either place must mean the US had other reasons to get involved in either place. The fact that neither effort was particularly successful does not detract from the humanitarian intentions.

One of Our Boys is dead- and we have a 5 paragraph treatise on international law from Adolf Hitler to Saddam Hussain!

Bloody hell, Keith- use your noddle and don't lose touch with reality. Are you Nick Clegg by any chance?

Reggie Perrin wrote:

>
> The USA had not just 'concluded' their war in Vietnam, they had
> been soundly beaten and forced to leave in a mighty hurry. They
> didn't learn from their policies of interventionism, because as
> you say they invaded Cambodia when it was convenient to them.
> They did nothing to help the Cambodian people when full-scale
> genocide was going on in 1975.

I said that VIETNAM had just concluded its 30 year war, not the US. America's secret invasion of Cambodia in april 1970, ostensbly to chase the VC and North Vietnamese regulars out and cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail was nothing to do with what I was talking about. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 about 4 years after the ejection of the last American forces from the South and quickly forced out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.


Reggie Perrin wrote:

>So the war in the Balkans was a humanitarian war? It's a shame nobody >got involved much when the local genocidal war was going on in 1992. >The 1999 campaign was all about giving the place a good shake-down, >putting everybody in their places in case they got too powerful, plus >making the Russians think twice about getting involved perhaps.

I'm sorry but make your mind up. If armed intervention is wrong per se, why was it a pity that nobody got involved? Surely any intervention was wrong, when it finally took place, by your reckoning. Should the rest of Europe have stood by any longer whilst a very nasty civil war (as if any civil war isn't nasty) and ethnic cleansing took place on the southern fringes of Europe only a couple of hours flying time from London? And I must disagree with you about why there was finally intervention. It may have been a short sharp lesson for Serbia, but basically it was a better late than never attempt to stop the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and elsewhere, as well as trying to difuse a situation that could quite easily have escalated to global confrontation had Russia not been distracted by domestic issues. It would not have been the first time that the Balkans played a major part in precipitating a world war.

Somalia was about deposing the particularly nasty competing 'war-lords' who were controlling the capital Mogadishu and much of the country. It all went tits up, 'Black Hawk Down' etc, and the US left after not too long, mission not accomplished. But the intention on Clinton's part was fundamentally benign.

When it comes down to it I dont think there's too much difference between us. I take your point that intervention is too often dressed up as humanitarian when in reality it is something else entirely.