Is The West About To Embark Into A Period Of Military Intervention

US Air Force F16 jet fighters sit on the tarmac at the Aviano air base in Italy on March 25, 2011. Press TV

Ivory Coast: UN Air Strikes Show West's New Appetite For Military Action -- The Telegraph

The UN air strikes in Ivory Coast suggest Libya was no fluke: the West's appetite for military action has recovered robustly from the diplomatic trauma of the Iraq war.

After a brief honeymoon following the successful mission to protect Kosovo in 1999, it seemed the Blairite era of "liberal interventionism" had been buried along with tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

The chaos after the steamrollering of the UN Security Council by Tony Blair and George W. Bush in 2002-03 seemed likely to usher in a new period of isolationism.

Barack Obama swept to power in 2008 on a wave of anti-war sentiment, while David Cameron entered Downing Street last year insisting that the West "can't drop democracy from 40,000ft".

Yet the past three weeks have found the council – this time with a less noisy Anglo-American wing – willing to pass stunningly powerful resolutions allowing missile strikes against murderous leaders.

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My Comment: From a historical perspective, the Europeans have a long and bloody legacy of always embarking on military action that in most cases reached a global scale .... a legacy that (in fact) goes back for centuries. What stopped this military adventurism in the latter half of the twentieth century was probably due to the impact that the Second World War had on Europe, and a determination among the survivors to not repeat this mistake.

But the survivors of the Second World War are now dying off, and the younger generation do not have the same memories and experiences that their parents and grandparents had. As a consequence it appears that military adventurism is coming back into vogue, and what is startling to me is that the anti-war movements are completely silent and AWOL on this development.