Dealing with dictators has become more difficult in recent times. In the past, democratic governments could go to war more easily, secure in the knowledge that they had public support, safe in the knowledge that distressing imagery from ‘the front’ would not make it on to screens back home. With the advent of 24-hour news media, those images of warfare are now spread quickly around the globe, often eliciting a negative response from the viewing public.

Recently, the BBC ran a series of programmes on BBC Parliament illustrating how the media’s coverage of war has changed in just the last 25 years. During the Falklands Conflict, British journalists were embedded with our forces and technically unable to broadcast live from the Islands. Furthermore, the MOD censored the footage and reports that did make it back to Britain, often causing a significant delay in the reporting of incidents. For example, footage of the May 4th attack on HMS Sheffield was not shown until over fortnight after the Exocet was launched against it. I could not imagine that type of delay being acceptable today.

This change in the way the media handles warfare has been widely welcomed. Commentators have argued that seeing the realities of war on our screens makes us all less inclined to support the use of force. That may very well be true. My concern is, however, that whether we like it or not, the world remains an unstable place, and as the pictures above highlight, there are still countries around the globe controlled by aggressive and violent dictators. What with the spread of nuclear technology and the apparent acceptability of state-financed terrorism (e.g. Hezbollah and Iran), the democracies of the world need to be on guard to defend freedoms that we all now take for granted.

But it is not just the defence of our freedoms, and indeed, the freedom of all peoples, which will require Britain and its fellow democratic countries to resort to force throughout the next century. It is also the defence of human rights, and the prevention of crimes against humanity, that should concern us all. What if the very media that provides daily reports of the loss of civilian life in Iraq, also brought us regular footage of barbarity in the Sudan and Zimbabwe, and detailed coverage of the recent famine in North Korea? Would there be a call for military intervention to save African and Korean lives? And if not, why not?

For being inconsistent on these matters elicits derision from the developing world. Displaying such double standards does nothing for our moral standing in the world. The situations in Zimbabwe and Darfur are an international disgrace, a shame on all of our houses. We should not be weak in the face of these issues, for it only serves to provoke further transgressions against humanity. Britain and its Allies should be prepared to intervene to protect any innocent life. And if it came to it, we should also be prepared to accept the awful face of the realities of war on our TV screens, if the ends justify the means. It would be a sad irony of the 21st century if the modern media’s detailed coverage of warfare inadvertently ended up costing more lives.