CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

In the 2004 US Presidential election campaign it was an issue taken up by the
Democrats who highlighted not only the lack of broad international support but the
continued diminution of the coalition as the security situation failed to stabilize. 139 The
issue re-arose, as was discussed above, in November 2004 when the US requested the
move of the UK’s 1 BW Battlegroup to support its operations around Fallujah.
The issues discussed above have all been broadly practical or realist considerations;
there is also a more idealist argument that an international order that limits the use of
force as an instrument of policy is simply ‘better’ than one that does not. As Francis
Fukuyama has argued in relation to the Iraq war:
a very large part of the world, including many people who are normally inclined
to be our friends, did not believe in the legitimacy of our behaviour towards
Iraq. This is not because the Security Council failed to endorse the war, but
because many of our friends did not trust us, that is, the Bush Administration, to
use our huge margin of power wisely and in the interests of the world as a
whole. This should matter to us, not just for realist reasons of state (our ability
to attract allies and share the burden), but for idealist ones as well (our ability
to lead and inspire based on the attractiveness of who we are). 140 (Emphasis
added)
So consideration of what is simply morally right can offer both idealist and practical
advantage, too, which states would do well to consider. This is the notion of moral
authority as a source of power – not perhaps on par with economic or military
resources, but nevertheless a power resource in its own right. Such an argument is
made by Rodney Hall 141 . Following Alexander Wendt’s constructivist argument that
interests must be defined in terms of the identities of the actors, Hall notes that power
resources can only be understood in the context of ‘a situationally specific or
historically contingent structure of coconstituted identities and interests.’ 142 Thus, just
as ‘the ability of military power resources relies on the capacity to credibly threaten
their use,’ 143 so moral authority is a power resource only in the context of an
international system which ascribes value to it.
Hall draws the empirical evidence for the foundation of his argument from feudal
Europe but points, too, to the emergence of ‘transnational moral authority’ as a power
resource in the Twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson justified the United States’ entry
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