CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

eligious sects, there may well be no help unless it comes from outside. And
when a government turns savagely on its own people, we must doubt the very
existence of a political community to which the idea of self-determination might
apply. 103
Nevertheless, Walzer continues with a warning that ‘clear examples of what is called
“humanitarian intervention” are very rare. Indeed, I have not found any, but only mixed
cases where the humanitarian motive is one among several. States don’t send their
soldiers into other states, it seems, only in order to save lives.’ 104 States’ motives may
be hard fully to unveil but it seems reasonable to argue that there have now been such
cases – the UK’s intervention in Sierra Leone in 2000 springs to mind. Nevertheless,
Walzer’s cynicism is historically justified. It is for this very reason that just war
requires right intent in addition to just cause. Walzer invokes just war, too, in
considering the importance of the practicability of an intervention:
A state contemplating intervention or counter-intervention will for prudential
reasons weigh the dangers to itself, but it must also, and for moral reasons,
weigh the dangers its actions will impose on the people it is designed to benefit
and on all other people who may be affected. An intervention is not just if it
subjects third parties to terrible risks; the subjection cancels the justice. 105*
(Original emphasis).
Walzer, as one who has had a leading place in articulation of the legalist paradigm must
be viewed as generally non-interventionist. Where he does allow of exceptions to the
rule Walzer’s argument on interventions, James Turner Johnson 106 suggests, can be
boiled down to issues of justice of cause and reasonable chance of success (or the
presence of a third party). Though, as we have seen, he also touches on right intent. In
other words, we are beginning to see the tenets of just war applied as the restriction on
intervention, in the same way that they were devised to constrain war.
George Lucas criticizes Walzer for being overly restrictive on intervention (and pre-
emption, which we shall examine in the next section) and, indeed, for being selective in
how he draws on Mill. In particular, Lucas draws attention to the following passage of
Mill’s, ignored by Walzer:
* How issues of jus in bello might affect the justice of an intervention is considered in the next chapter.
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