Martin Kettle tells us what very serious people think

... in the course of fighting an argument against the liberals in his head who don't want to recognise the independence of Kosovo. Apparently they're as bad as the Rwandan genocidaires, or something. The problem with Iraq is that a lot of people are apparently using it as an argument for not invading Kenya (Kenya?) Kettle is a really useful guy - if you ever want to engage in an uninspired boilerplate rant against a caricature of the most moronic version of Decency, then he is there - just as it looks like you've created a total strawman, there's Martin Kettle. The trouble is that even winning an argument against Kettle isn't particularly satisfying, as it just proves that the very stupidest possible version of any Decent argument doesn't work. Future generations will have forgotten the original sense of "the pot calling the kettle", and will only know it as a proverb against the equivalent of strawmen; "that's like the pot calling the Kettle an idiot".

Meanwhile, still turning over in my mind the fact that there was a humanitarian intervention in Rwanda. Operation Turquoise. It was a horrendously ill-planned invasion, more or less totally counterproductive and clearly aimed more at domestic political goals than any sincere attempt to help. This is the normal kind of humanitarian intervention. It is all very well to say that humanitarian interventions should not be done like Turquoise, but nobody has a plan to make them resemble it less. In related news, taking the Kosovo invasion as a model is setting the bar pretty fucking low too.