CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

HRW concluded that ‘the killing in Iraq at the time (of the 2003 invasion) was not of
the exceptional nature that would justify such intervention.’ 137
Right intent is perhaps a more objectively verifiable condition; there should be evidence
to support a state’s (or non-state actor’s) claim that its intentions in resorting to force
were righteous. This condition also helps us over another hurdle identified by Walzer –
few if any ‘humanitarian’ interventions are ever solely humanitarian (see p195);
motives are invariably mixed. If the justness of the cause is subjective and the motive
mixed, at least we can demand evidence that the intent was good.
Alex Bellamy, in examining broader approaches to the intervention debate than those
contained within the English School, suggests that the discussion can usefully be
enhanced by considering intervention
not as a discrete act but as part of a wider web of transnational relations.
Humanitarian claims made by interveners should not therefore be treated in
isolation or evaluated solely in relation to abstract notions of international law.
Instead, they should be assessed alongside the intervener’s role in constructing
the structural environment that caused the humanitarian emergency and the
resources it committed to preventing the catastrophe and rebuilding
afterwards. 138
A just war approach, however, would also allow consideration of this, as a key
component of right intent.
The importance of such right intent in intervention (whether purely humanitarian or not)
was stressed by the UK Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, when addressing the issue of
long term commitment to Afghanistan after the US-UK intervention to remove the
Taliban regime in 2002. *
Long before the terrorists hijacked the airliners that flew into the World Trade
Centre and the Pentagon, they hijacked Afghanistan. Its people have been the
biggest victims of the nexus formed by al-Qaida and the Taliban regime, through
the denial of human rights, the complete absence of any strategy for economic
development, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.
* Clearly this was an intervention justified primarily on self-defence and vital national interest issues
rather than humanitarian but a humanitarian element is still present in the rhetoric of justification.
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