There are many ways in which humanitarian intervention is viewed as a quintessentially "liberal" foreign policy practice, from the fact that liberal-democratic states have the principle initiators and the important role accorded to international institutions and the traditionally liberal concern for human rights. The 1999 Kossovo crisis is not an exception. If you look at the military operations carried out by the English-speaking nations in the last twenty years, the successes have been those which were undertaken either to expel a foreign invader, as in the Falklands in 1982 and Kuwait in 1991, or to overthrow a dictatorship which had negligible public support, as in Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and Haiti in 1994. Getting involved in a civil war is much more risky. For example, the United Nations intervention in Somalia from 1992 to 1995 was a total fiasco, which achieved absolutely nothing. When a civil war breaks out in a backward Third World country such as Somalia, Sierra Leone, Algeria or the Sudan, both sides are usually just as bad as each other, so it is not worth backing either of them. These countries are not likely to become stable democracies in the foreseeable future, no matter what the Western powers do. In these sorts of cases, it would be wise to follow a policy of non-intervention and leave the combatants to stew in their own juice.
             Kossovo, on the other hand, is not a backward Third World country. It is a part of Europe only two hours by jet from Heathrow Airport; nearer to us than some of the places where millions of Britons spend their summer holidays it was Robert Burns who said that even if you cannot right the world's wrongs, you should at least do what you can. The conflict between the Serbs and the Kossovars is not a case of six of one and half a dozen of the other. There is no doubt that the Serbs have committed ghastly atrocities. It is possible that the KLA have also committed atrocities, b...