CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

3.3.4 The Dangers of Unfettered Interventionism and What Just War Might
Offer
The argument of the last two sections is that there is a will, arguably an imperative, for
intervention on grounds of humanitarian rescue or on grounds of preservation of vital
interest (without necessarily meeting the obvious right of self defence against an
immediate and direct military threat); and that such a will/imperative is not satisfied by
the mechanisms made available by the legalist paradigm. Yet Chapter 2 has also shown
that if the legal paradigm has failed, there remains a requirement for justification for
resort to force (and of the conduct of wars); a free-for-all simply will not do. In arguing
the case for intervention beyond the mechanisms supplied by the Charter of the UN (in
the limited form in which they have been realized), there is a danger that we are arguing
for unfettered interventionism. The risks are made plain by Michael Ignatieff:
The same executive power that authorized a Kosovo intervention today also
authorized Vietnam and El Salvador yesterday. The day will surely come when
the executive will seek to intervene somewhere in the name of human rights and
do so in a fashion which violates or traduces the principles it purports to
defend.’ 93
This, in a nutshell, is the very reason why many nations have been reluctant even to
concede to UN authorization of intervention: for fear that every incidence of over-riding
the doctrine of non-intervention makes it that much easier to do so in future; once the
genie is released from the bottle it cannot be returned. As Nicholas Wheeler explains:
‘The worry here is that if individual states or groups of states are given the right to
decide when humanitarian intervention is justified this will lead to the powerful
imposing their values and interests on the weaker states.’ 94
Whether intervention is undertaken by the UN, a coalition, or even unilaterally (with or
without UN sanction), it is unlikely to be anything but a failure unless it has a clearly
understood political aim, to which all else is subordinate, and the necessary means: in
terms of manpower, equipment, resources, finance and mandate. All too often what has
been seen is an inadequate and ill-conceived response to moral outcry: ‘something must
be done.’ Colin Gray 95 warns that ‘(a)s a guide for moral behavior in foreign policy,
plainly there is something rotten with outrage as the standard for offence against
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