CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Solomou, a medic with The London Irish (a company of the London Regiment), argued
that ‘(s)oldiers cannot be above moral considerations. … … So I am resigning because I
don’t want to fight a war that is unjustified and illegal.’ 269 He had already made several
public statements of opposition to the war 270 and has since become a prominent
campaigner for ‘Military Families Against the War.’ It can, of course, be argued that it
took Solomou two years from the invasion of Iraq to declare his opposition to it and,
indeed, that he had not been mobilised for service there. Nevertheless, his very public
statement and subsequent campaigning have highlighted that for reservists, in particular,
lack of moral justification for a conflict can seriously undermine their willingness to
serve.
There is one further issue relating to the requirement for justification at the individual
level. That is the matter of individual legal and moral culpability. However, discussion
of this is deferred to the Chapter 4 in the specific, and most demanding, context of
asymmetric warfare.
2.4 Summary
This Chapter opened by making the case that the legal paradigm for conflict had failed.
It failed in part because of weaknesses inherent in its own structure, not least the P5’s
Security Council veto. In part, the failure has resulted from practicalities. There is no
enforcement mechanism that would realise the analogy with domestic law, and there is
evidence of a simple lack of faith in the institutions of peaceful conflict resolution.
Finally, at the end of the Twentieth Century a reordering took place of the value set
upon which the UN Charter paradigm had been predicated. As the perception of threat
to global peace moved from that of international territorial struggle to that of internal
oppression, so increasingly politicians have felt that the Charter’s placing of order and
stability above all else, based upon the inviolability of national sovereignty, was an
unsustainable model. It could not be allowed to act as the screen behind which
widespread violation of individual human rights was conducted.
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