It is not only possible to separate the motivation to intervene from the operational method but essential. The military commander needs to receive his mission with any limitations to plan the operation.
It is interesting that in Woodward's book "Obama's Wars" he mentions that the chiefs seemed to stand up to the politicians in terms of the Afghanistan surge in that they apparently said there is but one option and were unwilling to provide a range of options for the politicians to dither over. A bit of spine at last?
Probably the main reason why humanitarian interventions don't seem to work is that they are only implemented when there is a major humanitarian crisis already. It takes this to spur them into action - except in Libya where it is true Obama did not wait until the mass graves were filling (but then faltered on the implementation which has led to the French and British calling for a more agressive approach from NATO.)
So in the case of the Ivory Coast the UN with troops already on the ground dithers and the country slips back into civil war. Unable to get Gbagbo out of his palace the Northern forces state that they will starve him out... until the French take them by the hand and show them just how easy it is to get him alive when you have a handful of trained soldiers to do the business.
In great fear of having shown their colonial hand the French immediately announce that they will be pulling most of their troops out of the Ivory Coast and are going to throw in hundreds of millions in aid and allow the Ouattara forces to claim that they in fact arrested Gbagbo.
So yes while it would have been militarily easy to remove Gbagbo from office many months ago and deter the military from taking his side right back in the beginning politically it was impossible for the French. The UN forces would claim they had no mandate to support the will of the people and did not until resolution 1975 have the authority to protect the civilians with any means necessary. There are lessons to be learned from all this.
Interesting to note that supposedly under the guise of going after heavy weapons they (the French and rthe UN) did in fact target Gbagbo as I'm certain that the French if no one else realised that they needed to go for the head of the snake... and they did and had in the end to intervene to bring Gbagbo in.
So I say again that the problems with humanitarian interventions is that the timing is mostly too late and the methodology leaves much to be desired.
The Somalia case study where what started as a humanitarian intervention ended up with a get Aideed dead or alive. So yes without the first principle of war being followed - the selection and maintenance of the aim - matters can soon get out of control.
etc etc
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