This year sees the 25th anniversary of the publication of Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers, a text on how best to use lessons of the past. It provides a corollary to the aphorism that those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. This is especially relevant in Libya, where history has been enlisted to make the case both for and against military intervention.

Those making the moral case for action, including President Barack Obama, often cite the need to avoid repeating the failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Those arguing for no-fly zones recall northern Iraq, or the former Yugoslavia. But none of these is an exact fit. Unlike Rwanda, Libyan society is not structured along a single or dominant ethnic faultline. And Muammer Gaddafi’s threat to show no mercy to his opponents might have been just that: a threat, within the context of a civil uprising, to intimidate those who opposed him with arms. It was not necessarily a threat to every man, woman and child in Benghazi.