A quote from James Heartfield at Spiked Online, 8 May 2007

The ferment of ideas that became ‘humanitarian interventionism’ is not easy to reconstruct today. […] The reason that leftists tended to fixate on these foreign policy questions was not always because of what was happening ‘over there’. Rather it was their own need for a grand cause that drove their interest.

Academics Martin Shaw, Michael Ignatieff and Mary Kaldor, intellectuals Susan Sontag and Bernard-Henri Lévy, journalists Ed Vulliamy and Maggie O’Kane, aid worker Bernard Kouchner of Médecins Sans Frontières – all beat the path to Sarajevo to embrace the cause of the persecuted Bosnian Muslims. They ridiculed Western leaders for their inactivity until they got their air attacks on Yugoslavia. But in each case their concern did not really spring from the Bosnians’ predicament, but from the yearning for a belief that you could stand up for. While the Serbs were being bombed, the liberal interventionists were off looking for the next trouble spot. The only criticism they had of the Western powers was that they were not intervening hard enough. […]

Blair was a part of that ferment, and his ideas about military intervention in Iraq arose directly out of the case for humanitarian war that was framed in the 1990s. Like those other liberal interventionists Blair felt the need for a big cause – because, like them, his political outlook was shaped by the failure of statist socialism in the 1980s. That was the cause that they all were missing. [...]

Blair’s foreign secretary, the late Robin Cook, outlined an ‘ethical foreign policy’. This was an extraordinary departure. The Foreign Office had been listening to the liberal interventionists. Conscience, not national interest, would determine the use of force. It was a doctrine that Blair outlined in India in 2002: ‘We are not a superpower, but we can act as a pivotal partner, acting with others to make sense of this global interdependence and make it a force for good, for our own nation and the wider world.’ Many did not realise at the time just how destructive a message that was.