I cannot read these liberal interventionists without feeling that on some level they're operating out of tremendously bad faith. I'm sure Rieff cares at some level about saving the lives of the Kosovars, but what he and the rest of them are *really* enamoured of is having the * West's armed forces * "save" the Kosovars. It's like they've been waiting all their lives for history to give them a chance to act out their graduate school dissertations about Just War theory; to finally save the Jews.
If the Kosovo crisis had been solved through diplomatic means, without bloodshed, people like Rieff would have been crestfallen. And that's so damning.