FAR be it from me to argue that the United States or NATO should be intervening in Libya to stop Muammar Qaddafi from crushing the rebels. But the fact that we're not intervening is pretty telling, if you consider it in historical context. Had a broad-based citizen uprising against Mr Qaddafi broken out in 1999 or 2001, not only would there have been strong American political will for intervention, it would have been easy to put together an international alliance and perhaps even a UN mandate. Those were the years after the Clinton administration, in the aftermath of its embarrassing failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, had decisively embraced the idea of humanitarian intervention. NATO had gone along, and even the UN was pushing towards its eventual ratification of the "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which obliged outside powers to intervene militarily when countries failed to protect or actively attacked their own citizens. The Bush administration initially pulled back from the idea of humanitarian interventions, but after the attacks of September 11th it, too, embraced the liberal-internationalist idea of democracy promotion through force. A NATO that endorsed bombing campaigns and eventually military occupation of Kosovo would probably not have shrunk at the far more clear-cut case of Libya, had an uprising happened a dozen years ago.

But NATO is flinching now, and there has been a sea change in the international appetite for humanitarian military interventions. The reason for that sea change is obvious. It is a four-letter word ending in Q. America and her European allies (ah, I love to call America a lady. Got to do that more often) still believe in promoting democracy, obviously, but we no longer believe in doing so at gunpoint, or even in putting our own troops at risk for it when the heavy lifting is being done by a country's own citizens. The fiasco of the Iraq invasion has put us off that sort of thing indefinitely.

Iraq essentially broke the idea of a new world order based on an international community united under common basic precepts of minimally decent government. That breakage may not be permanent; the UN Security Council passed a strong Libya resolution with remarkable alacrity, and the International Criminal Court moved with unprecedented speed to open an investigation of war crimes in Libya. But if there is no "coalition of the willing" for intervention in Libya, that is due to the bitter taste Iraq has left in the mouths of Western governments and voters. The only European state pressing hard for air strikes in Libya is France, which has no bitter memories of foolish support for the invasion of Iraq because France opposed that invasion. Who's a cheese-eating surrender monkey now, eh?

All of which raises a question. Back in the days when the cause of humanitarian intervention was on the rise, during the argument over Bosnia policy, Madeleine Albright (in Colin Powell's telling) encapsulated the thinking in a pithy phrase: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Mr Powell wrote in his memoirs that he "almost had an aneurysm"; the military was not a toy to be used because we had it sitting around. But basically, Ms Albright was right: the United States inherited the world's strongest military because of the cold war, and if in the post-cold war world there were no longer any plausible uses for that military, there really was no point in having it. Mr Powell, in fact, presided over dramatic cuts in the size of the defence establishment. It was the embrace of humanitarian intervention in the cause of promoting democracy, first in Kosovo, then (after the attacks of September 11th) in Afghanistan and finally Iraq, that provided the new justification for a military buildup.

In the aftermath of wasting a couple of trillion dollars and several thousand American lives in Iraq, that justification for having a huge military appears to be dead, too. We have a legacy commitment in Afghanistan, but we are hoping to start winding that down beginning as early as this summer. After Afghanistan, what? If we are not interested in using the American military to stop Muammar Qaddafi from massacring his own people, and to secure oil fields run by Western companies whose precarious status is driving the price of oil over $100 a barrel and threatening to tank the world economy, it is not clear under what possible circumstances we might be interested in using the American military. The question, then, is why we are spending $700 billion a year on it. There is no point in having a superb military if you can't, or won't, use it. And in the long term, we really don't have $700 billion a year to spare for things that serve no purpose. If we're not going to use it anyway, I'd venture we could get along with a military that was, say, half as superb.