Should troops be sent to stop the genocide in Darfur? It would seem so. Humanitarian intervention seems to be the clearest case of a morally justified war. Surely wars fought to stop a genocide are more likely to be justified than wars fought to prevent the loss of territory.

But unfortunately most wars fought for humanitarian reasons also kill innocent people. This happens in all wars, but even more so in humanitarian wars. There is often no clear military target that needs to be destroyed, such as a supply depot. In order to win most humanitarian wars, one must try to break the will of a part of a civilian population that is oppressing another part of a population, rather than merely to defeat the enemy army in certain military campaigns. Humanitarian wars thus pose troubling problems that it make it hard to decide whether troops should be sent to places like Darfur.