ABSTRACT
The evolution away from the discourse of humanitarian intervention, which had been so divisive, and toward the embrace of the new concept of the responsibility to protect has been a fascinating piece of intellectual history in its own right. While Hanoi's motives may have been neither pure nor humanitarian, its intervention did stop the genocidaires in their tracks. The rationale for coercive humanitarian intervention is not punishment for past sins, however grotesque, but to avert, here and now, threats to large numbers of people which are actually occurring or imminently about to occur. It is not to allow a regime with a bloody past to be attacked by others at a time of their choosing: as Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch has put it, "'Better late than never' is not a justification for humanitarian intervention.
