Civil War in Libya

[Banquo's Ghost]

Well we can't invade China because we'll lose.

Precisely. So inevitably, foreign interventions are not based on ethics but on practicality. To me, the practicality is no intervention at all.

But it are practical considerations such as that that indeed mark the limit I would put on humanitarian intervention. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, we spread democracy as a matter of course. And we violently overthrow tyranny wherever there is a reasonable alternative, or whenever a situation is intolerable.
One can oust Gadaffi if the situation became desperate, although the better scenario is to leave it to market forces. He who, and that which, emerges victorious in Libya can subsequently reasonably be assumed to have a workable power base, for he wouldn't have won elsewise.

One cannot assume anything of the sort - the "victor" may be nothing of the sort a few days or months later. Tunisian secret police are already rounding people up in that "liberated" country. You of all people will be aware of how revolutions can turn out. In the end, all may be well, but that is up to the people who suffer through the change, not any external agency whose suffering is always likely to be minimal in comparison.

But to go back to the first point - surely your argument is "we violently overthrow tyranny wherever there is a reasonable alternative, or whenever a situation is intolerable, subject to the caveat that the tyranny hasn't got big guns, nukes or pointed sticks, lords over a sufficiently small population that we can be absolutely sure won't turn on us next, isn't supplying us with gas/oil/dried fruit on favourable terms, isn't sub-Saharan Africa, isn't in possession of a topography with mountains, jungles or Bradford, and with the proviso that 'intolerable' is a moveable feast if the aforesaid tyrant spends his money in Harrods."

I blame Iraq for destroying the appetite for humanitarian intervention. And Kosovo. In the former a US administration hijacked and made a mockery of the wish to do good and to make sacrifices to spread democracy, sadly, right in America, the one country that is not completely cynical about these things. The latter was a case of aiding one evil against another. Not an unmitigated disaster, for both warring parties were separated, but still best to think about while holding one's nose.

Humanitarian intervention was a lie before either of those two disasters, but they do graphically illustrate why such measures invariably go horribly wrong, usually at the expense of a lot of local people who are volunteered for martyrdom in the names of our "principles" and invariably with political consequences in the country so liberated that no-one could foresee.

Perhaps you are a devotee of the "Rumsfeld Arrangement" - ie the population will be so grateful for our intervention they will immediately strew our path with rose petals and the world will be in harmony as one?