A paradox of this claim is that the scope and success of the intervention depended less on deliberate policy and careful planning in Downing Street or Whitehall than on a daring degree of improvisation by the commanding officer on the ground. “Operation Palliser,” which began in May 2000, was led by General Sir David Richards, then a brigadier, later appointed chief of the British general staff and NATO commander in Afghanistan. Without official sanction from London, Richards protected the capital Freetown from rebel attacks and prevented it from falling. In so doing, he made a remarkable unilateral decision to go beyond his mandate in order to save a civilian population from the overwhelming likelihood of an all-out slaughter. The military historian David Ucko, writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies in 2015, calls Richards’s action “A rare success story, but… a poorly understood and little studied case.” [...]
The carnage they inflicted was unspeakable. In these raids on villages, according to interviews I did later, pieced together with testimonies from human rights investigators, soldiers forced parents to choose which of their children would be taken as fighters and which would be killed on the spot. Teenagers in gangsta-style baggy pants raped and plundered, taking girls as young as nine as their “bush wives.” Rebel soldiers asked adult villagers whether they wanted “long sleeves” or “short sleeves,” then hacked off their limbs with machetes. [...]
From their headquarters at Lungi Airport, Richards’s force quickly retook the road that the RUF had earlier cut, and then established a good intelligence network. A few days later, using tips from locals, British soldiers with support from a government commander who went by the name Spider succeeded in capturing Sankoh. It was a significant win—not only boosting the morale of government forces and securing popular support for Richards’s presence, but also opening the way for negotiations to secure the release of the Jordanian UN soldiers being held hostage (all eleven of them were later freed).[...]
Having watched the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda in the early 1990s—and the failures of intervention—Blair himself became an advocate for humanitarian intervention on principled grounds. In 1999, during the seventy-eight-day NATO-led military operation in Kosovo—a short, sharp war that drove Bosnian Serbs out of Albanian Kosovar territory—he delivered a speech at the Chicago Economic Club. In this “Doctrine of the International Community,” he spoke of the need to balance national interests with “moral purpose” in foreign affairs.
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