During the Second World War, a future prime minister, Harold Macmillan, said America is “the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.” How goes the tutoring of Rome by Athens?
We are in the fifth month of the Libyan intervention that Barack Obama’s administration said would involve “days, not weeks,” an undertaking about which Prime Minister David Cameron was much more enthusiastic than Obama, who rarely mentions it.
The intervention resulted from Cameron’s and French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s sudden zest for waging humanitarian war. Before its objective became regime change, the point was to prevent Moammar Gaddafi from inflicting a humanitarian disaster. Officials here speak of “a crime being committed within our reach.” But what is that reach?
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