The case of Pol Pot and Vietnam invading is useful to examine. In college, I knew some students who had fled Cambodia with their parents after Vietnam invaded, and from their accounts, the Vietnamese replaced genocide with brutal authoritarian rule. All too often, any sort of invasion, even those (very) few that are for altruistic and humanitarian purposes cause massive suffering and death. Killing 60,000 people while you were in the process of saving 100,000 lives seems dubious using anything other than the most calculatingly utilitarian ethics, and that's often what any sort of military action - even the most well intentioned looks like. Giving arms to a side that seems non-monstrous seems to me to be a good idea, and in fact sometimes even works. However, the track record for invasions is honestly quite dreadful.
Of course, that's not to say that I don't support some sorts of direct intervention. I can think of a number of cases where political assassination worked wonderfully well - the clearest example I know of being the assassination of Franco's chosen successor Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973. I'm all in favor of outside governments assassinating hideous tyrants. However, it's very clear that the reason most government would rather use war than assassination is that the leaders starting those wars don't like the idea of giving other governments the idea that killing political leaders is acceptable and instead prefer the traditional method of sending young people with little or no political power out to die by the thousands.
If someone wanted to use a drone to kill Assad, Kim Jong-un, or one of the various other monstrous autocrats currently in power around the world, I'd have no problem. However, I remain entirely skeptical that even well-intentioned modern wars actually cause more good than harm.
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Of course, that's not to say that I don't support some sorts of direct intervention. I can think of a number of cases where political assassination worked wonderfully well - the clearest example I know of being the assassination of Franco's chosen successor Luis Carrero Blanco in 1973. I'm all in favor of outside governments assassinating hideous tyrants. However, it's very clear that the reason most government would rather use war than assassination is that the leaders starting those wars don't like the idea of giving other governments the idea that killing political leaders is acceptable and instead prefer the traditional method of sending young people with little or no political power out to die by the thousands.
If someone wanted to use a drone to kill Assad, Kim Jong-un, or one of the various other monstrous autocrats currently in power around the world, I'd have no problem. However, I remain entirely skeptical that even well-intentioned modern wars actually cause more good than harm.