That extreme expedient can be considered only when all other efforts have been exhausted and peaceful solutions have proved not to be viable.

The seventeenth century French philosopher René Descartes solved it by the drastic expedient of denying that animals can suffer.

The risk in this American activism is that it will provide the excuse for Europeans to sit back and cheer while someone else does the heavy lifting.

This argument was also used (with strong opposition from Russia and China) to justify NATO intervention in Kosovo and more recently in Libya.

In both cases, the pretext for such an unusual decision has been that world conferences of speakers of parliament are private meetings that are not covered by the Agreement on the United Nations Headquarters .

The status quo is excused by Arab regimes in the name of cultural specificity the same pretext used by Western governments to justify their value free policies toward these regimes.

And such potential bloodshed on Russia s border may give Vladimir Putin the pretext he may desire to extend his rule beyond its constitutionally mandated end next March.

The end of President Alvaro Uribe s re election bid in Colombia will complicate life for the Caracas caudillo , removing a pretext for his own perpetuation in power.

Kosovo was a stalking horse for Iraq, as the doctrine of humanitarian intervention morphed into President George W. Bush s doctrine of pre emptive war, by which the US claimed the right to attack any state that it deemed a threat to its national security.

The argument put forward by the Turkish side, that Turkish Cypriots continue to face difficulties arising from the ongoing so called political, economic, cultural and social isolation , although they have fulfilled their responsibilities by voting in favour of the Annan Plan, is baseless.