Use any euphemism you wish, but in the end these interventions have to be about regime change if they are to have any chance of accomplishing their stated goal. (That is why they are opposed in many parts of the formerly colonized world even as they are supported in the formerly colonizing West.) After all, how can the people of Darfur ever be safe as long as the same regime that sanctioned their slaughter rules unrepentant in Khartoum? Or, for that matter, how can the Myanmar government be trusted to look after the slow business of reconstruction in the zones hit by the cyclone if it was unconcerned with the fate of Nargis’s survivors from the beginning?

The harsh truth is that it is one thing for people of conscience to call for wrongs to be righted but it is quite another to fathom the consequences of such actions. Good will is not enough; nor is political will. That is because, as Iraq has taught us so painfully, the law of unintended consequences may be one of the few iron laws of international politics. And somewhere, despite all the outcry, leaders know that the same people calling for intervention may repudiate it the moment it goes wrong.