I wouldn't mind non-intervention as a policy, long as we no longer hear the pieties about how much we supposedly care about human rights. Keep in mind that by making non-intervention a policy, you've just given a green light to every would-be Pol Pot on the planet. Long as they're not dumb enough to take a swing at the US, they can kill to their heart's content.

That probably doesn't sit right with you.

We can't help ourselves - there will always be the strongly-worded press release, the condemnation of the latest atrocity in the strongest possible terms, and perhaps even a conference if things are really bad.

"Never again" is a promise. Don't make that promise if you're not willing to put some teeth into it.

Can we save everybody? No. The combined might of the part of the world that likes to call itself "civilized" couldn't have stopped Stalin or Mao. But it doesn't then follow that we should save nobody.

So how to decide who gets saved and who doesn't?

It'll come down to what's doable and where is it most in our interest to be stopping a genocide.

In other words, Rwanda was preventable, but the Congo genocide was probably going to be too much to handle no matter what we threw at it.

Which brings us to Iraq. At any time during Saddam's reign it would have been perfectly defensible to say that it's in the world's interest not to have a genocidal loose cannon sitting on all that oil, so let's take him out and solve two problems at once - but Clinton was trigger-shy and the Bush administration stupidly decided to frame the guilty party and went with the WMD angle.

It would have left the west in a stronger position to do something sooner elsewhere in the world.