CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

… … The global threat to our security was clear. So was our duty: to act to
eliminate it.
… … It may well be that under international law as presently constituted, a
regime can systematically brutalise and oppress its people and there is nothing
anyone can do, when dialogue, diplomacy and even sanctions fail, unless it
comes within the definition of a humanitarian catastrophe (though the 300,000
remains in mass graves already found in Iraq might be thought by some to be
something of a catastrophe). This may be the law, but should it be?
… … The doctrine of international community is no longer a vision of
idealism. … … The best defence of our security lies in the spread of our
values.
But we cannot advance these values except within a framework that recognises
their universality.
This far-reaching speech contains some critical ideas: of a right to humanitarian
intervention; of a right to unilateral military actions of preventive defence; of a right to
ignore international law when that law is perceived to be no longer appropriate; and
reiteration of a traditional liberal crusading view of peace and security through the
spread of liberal values (as discussed in Section 1.1.2 ). The merits of these views are
not for consideration here, though they will be discussed in the context of just war in the
next chapter; the issue here is the challenge they represent to the legalist paradigm; and
that is unambiguous.
Both Kosovo and Iraq (2003) serve as clear examples of the determination of States to
act without specific UN authority when they believe that the UN has been/would be
ineffective. The renewed hope in the UN Charter paradigm, triumphantly heralded after
the successful action of collective security in the 1991 Gulf War, has given way
progressively to renewed doubts about the adequacy on the international legal apparatus
for constraining use of force, and renewed claims by states of sovereign authority over
such decisions. The UN Charter paradigm, in a strict legalist interpretation, has failed.
Phillip Allott, Professor of Public International Law at the University of Cambridge, has
welcomed the public debate over the ‘legality’ of the war in Iraq but argued that it has
been based on a widespread misunderstanding of the nature of international law. The
debate to be had, he has argued, was not a legal one but a moral and political one. 110
This thesis will later argue that if moral and political debate is to be had, then the just
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