CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

placing just cause at the top of the argument with a set of conditions that are to be met.
The subjectivity is not entirely removed; rather it is transferred to debates about justice
and what constitutes an ‘intractable injustice’. Similarly there may remain argument
about what scale of atrocity is needed to genuinely ‘shock the conscience of mankind’.
Vattel was only too well aware of this, insisting on the need for a system of ‘voluntary
law’ – objectively verifiable – to avoid the otherwise inevitable situation of any
protagonist in a conflict declaring just cause and right on their side (see p52) Today we
see both the United States and her allies, on the one hand, and the terrorist organisations
who have attacked her, on the other, claim just cause. Were either side to adopt
Holliday’s formulation, then they would similarly lay claim to an ‘intractable injustice’.
To take but one example of the difficulty in objectively determining just cause, we
could consider the 2003 Iraq War. Although justified before the event on more
traditional self-defence and national interest lines, there was a gradual post hoc shift in
the US (and even more pronouncedly in the UK), to humanitarian justification.
As the months have passed and U.S. weapons inspectors have failed to report
significant finds, the administration has gradually shifted from dire-sounding
warnings about alleged Iraqi weapons toward a greater emphasis on other
justifications for the war in Iraq.
One is that the war was intended to bring democracy to Iraq, and eventually
perhaps to its neighbors; the other is that it toppled a brutal dictator responsible
for perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths. 135
This shift was reflected in President Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address which
referred to US armed forces ‘bringing hope to the oppressed, and delivering justice to
the violent …’. 136 He continued:
Had we failed to act … … … Iraq's torture chambers would still be filled with
victims, terrified and innocent. The killing fields of Iraq -- where hundreds of
thousands of men and women and children vanished into the sands -- would still
be known only to the killers. For all who love freedom and peace, the world
without Saddam Hussein's regime is a better and safer place.
Yet, at the same time, leading humanitarian activist group Human Rights Watch (HRW)
denied the humanitarian imperative of the Iraq invasion. Arguing that use of force
might have been justified by the Iraqi regime’s atrocities against the Kurds in 1988,
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