President Obama justified America's backing of Nato's intervention in Libya on humanitarian grounds. Speaking to the nation on March 28, 2011, the president said: "If we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world." There is no guarantee, of course, that Libya's factions will not turn against one another — but a slaughter on a scale such as Syria has experienced would have been a near certain guarantee that Libya would disintegrate.

Incidentally, Syria has several cities the same size as Benghazi. Unlike Benghazi, they have suffered massacres that will continue to reverberate across the region, leaving indelibly stained consciences — although whether that includes the world's is debatable, given continuing international indifference to the suffering on the ground. When the dust settles, ethnic cleansing is likely to have happened and it will not be reversible.

The opportunity for concerted efforts to pilot a peaceful transition from dictatorship to multi-ethnic democracy, if it ever existed, has now gone. And perhaps, with an eye to the rest of the region, it is time finally to discard our grand illusions of saving the state system which has been in place since the end of the Ottoman Empire.Kinship, once frustrated by oppression and enraged by the call for revenge over spilled blood, is stronger than any diplomatic aspiration to preserve the status quo.

When the dust settles, after we have watched thousands more die, the patchwork of ethnicities will probably look simpler. The boundaries that included them without acknowledging them will have been overrun by history. Unless we can stop the bleeding now, we might as well accept that nothing will be as it once was, and that the rough coincidence of boundaries with ethnicity, once established, may offer the best guarantee for a kinder future.