On “Humanitarian Intervention”

I am old enough to remember when a “humanitarian intervention” meant organizing collections of food and blankets to send to distant communities in distress. Heck, in my elementary school in England we knitted little 6-inch squares to make up such blankets: they were taken away, sewn together, and delivered to the Red Cross by the teachers.

Nowadays, though, the term “humanitarian intervention” is nearly always understood to mean military action-or, in short, war. How did this happen?