One of the most malign legacies of Tony Blair’s calamitous premiership was the death of ‘humanitarian intervention’, by which the West would use its military might to prevent atrocities occurring in less enlightened nations.

For his part, Blair had claimed that his 2003 invasion of Iraq was based entirely on moral grounds. He said it would bring democracy to Iraq and rescue the country from the evil dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

In the event, it turned out that Mr Blair’s often repeated statement that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction was a cynical lie.

Former PM Tony Blair, left, lied repeatedly about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq which were used as an excuse to justify the overthrow of Saddam Hussein

Blair's decision led to the rise of ISIS and led to the destabalisation of the middle east

Worse, the removal of Saddam unleashed an orgy of bloodshed and destruction that continues to this day, led to the rise of Islamic State, destabilised the Middle East and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Mr Blair also, of course, took Britain into a conflict with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That lasted 13 years and claimed the lives of more than 450 of our Armed Forces personnel.

So it is little wonder the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq— as well as Britain’s role in unseating Colonel Gaddafi, sparking the anarchy that exists in Libya today — has given intervention a bad name.

Yet history shows that it is not always wrong if carried out at the right time, for honest motives, and in a sensible way.

Very few would deny that Britain was right to fight the Nazis in 1939, or that we should, in all conscience, have intervened to interrupt the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 that cost the lives of up to a million people.

In Myanmar (formerly Burma) thousands of Rohingya Muslims, pictured, have been forced to flee their homes and cross into neighbouring Bangladesh

Myanmar is being led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, pictured

There is a humanitarian crisis approaching biblical proportions in Myanmar

Had we intervened earlier in the Balkan conflict of the Nineties, there would have been no Srebrenica, the awful genocide for which Ratko Mladic, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, was last week sentenced to life imprisonment at the International Criminal Court at the Hague.

Yes, it was wrong to invade Iraq. But that does not mean it is wrong to intervene in every international crisis.

In recent months, I have travelled to the killing fields of Myanmar (formerly Burma) in south-east Asia, where a ruthless military machine has been systematically killing or expelling thousands of minority Rohingya Muslims, who have lived there peaceably for many years. And this in a country led by the feted Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Pope Francis, left, began a visit to Myanmar yesterday and met Aung San Suu Kyi, right

I have also witnessed at first hand a humanitarian disaster of almost Biblical proportions that is currently stalking the Yemen, where around 58,000 have been killed or injured amid the savagery of a civil war which has raged since 2015.

In each of these cases, the global community has wrung its hands but done nothing whatever to curb the violence.

On the basis of what I have seen, I believe the moment has now come to urgently reassess the world’s new unspoken orthodoxy of non-intervention.

In Myanmar — as TV viewers have seen so graphically — more than half the Rohingya Muslim population has been driven out of the country in the past three months.

They are the lucky ones. Thousands have been murdered, and many more raped.

Let’s set out the unpalatable truth: a genocide is happening in full view of the world.

Soldiers move from village to village, burning, raping and killing. They are set on the annihilation of the country’s more than one million Rohingyas.

So appalled was Penny Mordaunt, the International Development Secretary, when she met survivors of the ethnic cleansing this week in Bangladesh where they had fled, that she promised a further £12 million to help with the crisis.

At the same time, Pope Francis began a visit to the country and met Aung San Suu Kyi yesterday, after which he called for a cessation of violence.

There is also a humanitarian crisis in Yemen were seven million people face starvation

The moral case for an international military intervention, sanctioned by the United Nations, to create safe areas for Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims is powerful indeed.

No doubt China, Myanmar’s strong regional protector, would see such an intervention as an act of aggression. But why hasn’t there been a global chorus of condemnation? Why at the very least hasn’t Aung San Suu Kyi been targeted with sanctions and stripped of her Nobel Peace Prize?

Why isn’t there a move to bring her blood-stained military leaders before the International Criminal Court?

The situation in Yemen is even more frightening. This small desert state is a cauldron for a proxy conflict between two regional giants — Saudi Arabia and Iran, who are divided by their adherence to two opposed branches of Islam.

Yemen’s government is comprised of Sunni Muslims aligned to the leaders of several neighbouring Sunni states, including Saudi Arabia. The Houthi rebel movement fighting the government, however, is a Shia Muslim faction supported by the Shia state of Iran — a sworn enemy of Saudi Arabia.

The UN has warned that, with seven million people on the brink of starvation, the conflict in Yemen is set to create ‘the largest famine the world has seen for many decades’.

Yet here, too, there has been no meaningful international response. Yemen’s neighbour Saudi Arabia has established a blockade to prevent aid reaching the millions of starving people across the border.

The effects are truly horrible. There is no fuel, so no transport to move food where it is needed most. In the hospitals, generators fail. Without generators, the medicines and vaccines cannot be preserved.

Many are already dying of malnutrition, yet the world sits idly by. Sadly, there are powerful underlying forces which explain this global inertia.

In sharp contrast to his predecessor, Donald Trump sees every foreign policy decision through a prism of naked self-interest. This means that America has been more interested in bombing Al-Qaeda militants who have a foothold in some central areas of Yemen than in stopping the civil war.

Meanwhile, China and Russia both pursue a venal foreign policy which is utterly contemptuous of human rights.

Europe is increasingly convulsed by internal problems, the most recent of which is the political crisis faced by Angela Merkel in Germany. It is incapable of offering leadership.

Should Britain also turn away from these terrible tragedies? There are several compelling reasons why we should not.

The most crucial of these is moral: the absolute Christian imperative to care for suffering fellow human beings.

The second is directly related to our history. Britain is the former colonial power that held sway both in what was Burma and also in the Yemen.

In Burma, thousands of British troops fought through the jungles against the Japanese during World War II, sacrificing themselves in the pursuit of final victory. And Yemen was a cradle of British colonial power for centuries, its port of Aden a vital refuelling station for troop-ships heading to India.

Third, we are what is known in diplomat-speak as the ‘pen-holder’ (meaning that we take the main responsibility) at the United Nations Security Council for decisions relating to both Yemen and Myanmar.

Finally (and much the least important), we need to disprove the Remainers’ contention that Brexit means Britain is turning in on itself.

Yet so far our response has been weak. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson — a figure who has been unfairly traduced on other issues — has scarcely lifted a finger on this calamity.

He has made the right noises but he has done virtually nothing of any significance to help.

In the Yemen, we are actually complicit because of our close relationship with the Saudi royal family — with whom we trade arms enthusiastically.

Some take the cynical view that these conflicts are too complicated and too far away, and that Western intervention will only make things worse.

I don’t believe any decent human being can take that view. We must press the UN to establish safe havens around Myanmar, and use all our diplomatic force to obtain a break in the violence in Yemen, and for military and humanitarian intervention there by the UN.

History will damn us if we continue to sit on the sidelines — and it will also record that Tony Blair’s interventions so poisoned the well of international affairs that we are too scared to make a stand when it really needs to be made.