The need for military intervention in humanitarian emergencies

I have been a keen student of international intervention since long before my command of the United Nations forces in Cambodia. My military career has spanned much of the Cold War years and has taken me to places like Malaysi a during tile period of confrontation over its formation, Vietnam, Europe a t the height of the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, and most of S outheast Asia. I was an instructor at the British Army Staff College at the time of the establishment of UNIFIL the United Nations Interim Force in Le banon - a serious aberration in the determinedly passive international peac ekeeping approach to that time. Thr earlier intervention in the Congo in th e 1960s seemed to have warned the UN off anything forceful in disrupted sta tes, leaving it to former colonial powers to extract themselves from their former areas of engagement with as much saving grace as they could muster. Many of them did not do this very well.