The satellite pictures of the Irawaddy delta make the world's anguished frustration worse.

If the “before” and “after” images can be photographed so neatly, then why can rice and medicine not be dropped into the picture, into the formerly green areas now turned into a horrifying brown blur? Or could they be distributed by force?

Bernard Kouchner, France's Foreign Minister, spoke for many in arguing that the United Nations should intervene, adding that it gave itself the power to do so three years ago in a new agreement which was supposed to be ground-breaking.

But he is wrong if, by intervention, he means the use of force. Even if he means simply air drops of aid, he has yet to make the case that it would work.

He is also on weak ground in invoking the UN's “Responsibility to Protect”, an honourable concept that has not yet found purchase on reality.

Burma is hardly the first country to be run by a regime that does not care about the welfare of the people it controls. North Korea is the same; so is Zimbabwe.

Other countries that do care have always wrestled with the question of when the atrocities inflicted by those regimes should justify overriding the rights of sovereignty.

More often than in the past, those who pushed the “Responsibility to Protect” through the 2005 UN World Summit say. The principle offers the beginnings of a legal basis for countries to act collectively, if endorsed by the UN Security Council, against states that fail to protect their populations from “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

The General Assembly backed it, which means it is not mandatory, but might be interpreted as being part of international law (although this is a contested point, to say the least).

But those countries most concerned about protecting sovereignty — China, Russia and in its way, the United States — have been lukewarm about any application. They head a powerful sovereign rights lobby within the UN. As the Assembly agreed, sovereign rights should not be absolute.

But the authorisation of intervention, as endorsed by the Assembly, is hedged with many conditions that Burma does not meet. For a start, it is not straightforward to argue that the regime is actively committing the abuse of its population demanded by the principle.

Those advocating intervention by force also have to explain how it would be done, given that the armies of the West are more than occupied already.

They cannot imagine that it would be a trivial task to take on a military regime capable of responding as powerfully as the Burmese Army did in putting down last year's rebellion. China's intense opposition to any action can be assumed, and it is unpredictable what form that might take.

Finally, those proposing simply dropping the aid (instinctively the most tempting solution) still have to explain how it will work. Oxfam argued yesterday that “air drops can help but are hugely expensive [and] very limited in what they can deliver ... Food and mosquito nets cannot be targeted at the most vulnerable”.

It added that “clean water systems and safe sanitation cannot be dropped from the sky” and that “If there isn't an aid operation on the ground to distribute the aid, the air drops can exacerbate tense relations within communities with only the fittest and fastest benefiting”.

Agonising as it seems, the best course is still to put on pressure, with China's help, if possible, to get aid teams in.

Those arguing for forcible intervention are distracted by the wrong question: whether other countries have the right to do so. It is irrelevant whether they do if the intervention would not make the situation better, and tragically, in Burma's case, that appears to be the case.

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