What about Yugoslavia, 1991? Note, 1991. i.e. when militias are terrorizing villages, the Yugoslav army is coming apart/turning into a Serbian army, and the Croatian army hardly even exists. As I have suggested, a joint Franco-German intervention would not have been easy, and there probably would have been months of mayhem before they got things locked down, but... tens of thousands of lives saved. It doesn't solve the problems that precipitated the war, but those problems were never serious enough to justify war. Instead of a decade of wars, a decade of establishing a political process for partition of territory.

Perhaps my scenarios are not realistic, but they are a lot more objective than conjectures about future civil wars.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Which they are, so there will be.

when you see someone being raped, don't call the police

If you see the government starving people to death, do you call the cops?

When the starving people start raping each other, it's scant consolation that the right hand of the government will mete out punishment in the communities destroyed by the left hand.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

Well, that depends on who the police are, obviously.

The right analogy is if you see someone being raped, call in drone strikes. Which seems to be sbout the direction that law enforcement is going, with rumours that US police departments are looking into using drones.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

No. What I see is the European welfare states being burned down in a conflagration of misanthropy and stupidity. That leads me to the assumption that any war run by them will be equally stupid and misanthropic if not more so.
In fact stopping them from destroying Europe's economy seems the easier task compared to keeping an humanitarian intervention humanitarian. And up till now we are failing quite hard at it.

There's one thing worse that either military intervention or no intervention: incompetent military intervention. I am confident the EU won't disappoint.

I distribute. You re-distribute. He gives your hard-earned money to lazy scroungers. -- JakeS

If we have war, then the European project is a failure. But the continent and its people continue to exist, regardless of institutional structure, so the question of the European interest is still pertinent.

In the event of a war in Europe, the entities which are able to put boots on the ground will be, at best, acting in their own national interest (and more probably in the narrow special interests of a certain slice of their oligarchy). In terms of pertinence, the European interest is located somewhere slightly below the interests of the people being intervened in. The latter can, at least, shoot back.

The EU, or its constituents, had no institutional obligation to intervene in Yugoslavia in 1991. Is that a valid excuse for not doing so? Do you think any such intervention would have made things worse?

In practice, given that the same countries who were going to be intervening had been the loudest cheerleaders for starting the civil war they were intervening into in the first place, yes.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.