story again over the last year, in the context of Syria, as I will come back to below). The action that needed to be taken was eventually taken, by a coalition of the willing, but without the authority of the Security Council, thus challenging the integrity of the whole international security system (just as did the invasion of Iraq four years later in far less defensible circumstances). There was at least real debate about these issues in the '90s, but it was fierce, doctrinal and essentially ideological argument, producing nothing remotely resembling consensus. On the one hand, there were advocates, mostly in the global North, of "humanitarian intervention" -- the doctrine that there was a "right to intervene" militarily, against the will of the government of the country in question, in these cases ('droit d'ingerence' in the words of Bernard Kouchner, its primary advocate). On the other hand there were defenders of the traditional prerogatives of state sovereignty, who made the familiar case that internal events were none of the rest of the world's business. It was very much a North-South debate, with the many new states born out of decolonization being very proud of their new won sovereignty, very conscious of their fragility, and all too conscious of the way in which they had been on the receiving end in the past of not very benign interventions from the imperial and colonial powers, and not very keen to acknowledge their right to do so again, whatever the circumstances. Hardly