CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

and noted that the Foreign Office had warned before the war that ‘Iraq could become a
breeding ground for Al-Qaida.’
Issues of jus in bello, too, have an impact on international standing. In April 2004 a
group of more than 50 former British diplomats (including such leading figures as Sir
Marrack Goulding, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping, and Sir
Crispin Tickell, former UK Ambassador to the UN), signed an open letter to the Prime
Minister criticising British and US policy in Iraq and the wider Middle-East. Foremost
amongst their criticisms was not the decision to go to war but the nature of its conduct:
The conduct of the war in Iraq has made it clear that there was no effective plan
for the post-Saddam settlement.
…
The military actions of the coalition force must be guided by political objectives
and by the requirements of the Iraq theatre itself, not by criteria remote from
them. It is not good enough to say that the use of force is a matter for local
commanders. Heavy weapons unsuited to the task in hand, inflammatory
language, the current confrontations in Najaf and Fallujah, all these have built
up rather than isolated the opposition. 121
Two themes emerge from this letter, both common throughout criticism of the Iraq war.
Firstly, there is an argument that echoes Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine (see Section
1.2.1 and is summarised thus by Sir Michael Howard: ‘War is instrumental not
elemental: its only legitimate object is a better peace.’ 122 If the justification for the Iraq
war was a better peace, and there is plenty of evidence of that line of justification in the
statements of both the American and British Governments, then proper consideration of
the requirements for building that peace should have been fundamental to the
preparations for war. Just war doctrine requires such consideration in its requirement
for ‘right intent.’ Had such consideration been given and plans for the post-conflict
reconstruction of Iraq been better implemented, then right intent would have been easier
to argue and a considerable weight of criticism deflected. The argument is developed
by Edward Luttwak 123 of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Posing the
question ‘How have the Americans, who liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, managed to
make themselves so unpopular so quickly?’ he notes that to some extent the media
portrayal of Iraqi opposition to coalition forces has been over-stated.
105