Past experience. For Europe and its member states, the prolonged participation in armed conflicts is both ineffective and damaging. This is an observation. Military intervention is sometimes inevitable but the longer it is drawn out, the more problems and failures there are. These generalisations might appear excessive and in this column, strange, but developments, particularly in Libya, appear to be so similar to those experienced in the past (Korea, the Suez Canal, Iraq, etc) that a...