News from the New Party

Letting the killers get on with it

Norm Geras pinpoints the flaw in the idea that but for Tony Blair's foreign policy, everything would be well with the world.

If [Jonathan Freedland is] right that there's something close to a consensus on this, it would be good to have it summed up in a handy way. May I suggest the following: when genocides are in progress, the killers should just be allowed to get on with it. This humane conclusion will surely hold its own against the generations of writers on international law who have held that in certain extreme circumstances intervention on humanitarian grounds is justified.

Enough said.