Your copy of the FT this morning contained a good article by Samuel Brittan.

Sadly not much of is up for public viewing on the FT website (just this).

So before I lose my copy, here's the gist of it.

Brittan reviews two books: The British Moment paradoxically written in support of the "Scoop" Jackson society (Brittan says that Palmerston would be a better model for the authors of such a book); and What´s wrong with Liberal Interventionism by Roger Howard. The first is dangerous, the second disappointing.

Brittan has characterises scepticism for the Liberal Interventionist argument in the figure of Cobden - and we have been in this area before on the Apollo Project. (My view was that Palmerston was more of a nationalist than an interventionist.)

Brittan pinpoints one of the problems with liberal interventionism when he writes that "the results of well-intended intervention are often to increase the amount of suffering and misery in the world". He might add that it inevitably creates martyrs to feed fresh conflicts.

His final paragraph is worth reproduction in full:

In a speech in 1999, Tony Blair stated five criteria for human rights intervention. They included adequate preparation for the long term in the countries concerned and confining ourselves to "to sensible and prudent" military operations. What is wrong is not the the criteria but the ease with which the UK prime minister believes they are met. A Cobdenite would examine each case with intense suspicion and often come down on the side of, at most, indirect pressure.