Intervening in Genocide

Intervening in Genocide, as terrible as it sounds is actually a really bad idea.

1.You would have to take down the genocide perpetrators by force. The perpetrators are obviously not going to stop the killings no matter what international pressure says

2.When you do intervene militarily, civilians are guaranteed to be killed in the crossfire, defeating the entire purpose of a humanitarian intervention.

3.You would have to ally with the enemies of the perpetrators. Often times, the enemies of the perpetrators are just as brutal as the perpetrators themselves. Also, that is totally defeating your purpose of the intervention. For example in the Liberian Civil War, literally every single faction (INPFL, NPFL, LPC, ULIMO-J, ULIMO-K) practiced cannibalism, rape, and used child soldiers. So if you wanted to intervene against the brutal NPFL, you would have to ally with a bunch of cannibalistic child soldiers. Not something that would go very well with public opinion

4.Since in most wars, all sides commit atrocities. To make matters more complicated, there's almost always an oppressive dictatorship warring against dozens (sometimes thousands) of vicious marauding rebel groups. If you want to have a purely humanitarian intervention, you would literally have to battle hundreds of rebel groups, along with the government forces.  For example in the Congo, various rebel groups like RCD splinters (RCD-Goma, RCD-K, RCD-K-ML, RCD-Original, UPC, RCD-ML, RCD-North, PUSIC, RCD-National), foreign rebel groups (FDLR, ADF, LRA, UNRF 2, WNBF, CNDD), indigenous tribal militias called mayi mayi, the Kabila regime, foreign governments like Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi all commit horrific atrocities against the civilian population. If you want to stop atrocities, you would have to battle more than 25 armed groups and 8 national armies. Waging such a multi front war would really drain your military resources.   

5.Once you topple the genocidal government, you would have to make sure that the roles of victim and perpetrators don’t get reversed. You would get the former victims angry because you are depriving them of their revenge, and you would be fighting the former victims as well. Like in the Rwandan Genocide, once you toppled the Hutu government, you would have to make sure that the Tutsi groups don’t start killing the Hutus. It might make the Tutsi groups angry at you if you try to prevent them from getting their revenge against their former oppressors. So you might be fighting the very people that you tried to protect.

6.Because of both remnants of the former genocidal government and other groups taking the void of the former government would be still waging guerilla warfare against your occupying forces, you might be stuck in that country for several decades before the situation is finally solved. If you try to leave right away, a new group would immediately take power. For example when the US Coalition left Iraq, the Iraqi government was still corrupt and weak. It didn’t have the military power to crush the insurgent groups like ISIS, other Sunni militant groups, along with the Baathists that were normally contained by the Coalition forces.