Since
September 11, no question has been more urgent for America and the West than how to combat terrorism. The danger of this dramatic and necessary change is, however, that it threatens to obscure the problem of humanitarian intervention—the need for it and its limits. This is no small matter, for even in these dangerous times, it remains crucial for America and the West to establish that in international affairs they care about more than just their own self interest.
The 1999 war in Kosovo was defined by British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the world’s first humanitarian war. The war was followed by international intervention in East Timor—first by Australia and then by the United Nations—to end Indonesia’s brutal twenty-four-year occupation of the island. At the end of the old millennium, the world seemed to be changing the way it thought about humanitarian intervention. On September 20, 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan spoke to this subject in his address to the la...
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