CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

on the duty to protect communities from mass killing, women from
systematic rape and children from starvation.
Secondly, the responsibility to protect acknowledges that the primary
responsibility in this regard rests with the state concerned, and that it is
only if the state is unable or unwilling to fulfill this responsibility, or is
itself the perpetrator, that it becomes the responsibility of the
international community to act in its place. … …
Thirdly, the responsibility to protect means not just the “responsibility to
react,” but the “responsibility to prevent” and the “responsibility to
rebuild” as well. It directs our attention to the costs and results of action
versus no action, and provides conceptual, normative and operational
linkages between assistance, intervention and reconstruction
(Emphasis added)
This strikes a chord, too, with Ian Hollidays’s reassessment of just cause. 149
It is reasonable to argue that both the UK and US governments seem to have learned
from Iraq the importance of planning for the aftermath of military intervention. The UK
has established an inter-departmental Post Conflict Reconstruction Unit 150 whilst in the
US Department of Defense Directive 3000 151 of December 2005 seeks comprehensively
to address perceived US weaknesses in this field at the strategic level. Staff at the US
Army School of Advanced Military Studies at the Command and General Staff College
have posited a need for ‘a collective shift in thinking from the Cold War mentality of
fighting set-piece battles and then moving on to one that understands nation-
building.’ 152
As noted above, however, right intent must be underpinned by commitment of
resources, which must include not just money and materiel, but time and political will.
The importance of being prepared to commit energy and resources over time – working
towards an ‘end state not an end date’ – was learned at cost by the West in interventions
in Africa and the Balkans. 153 Nevertheless, we may still need to learn the importance of
being prepared to invest sufficient political will. US involvement in Somalia ended in
debacle because commitment to success was insufficient to ride-out domestic
abhorrence at eighteen US deaths. * With (at Aug 2006) over 2500 US and over 100 UK
fatalities in Iraq 154 , political will seems to be holding. However, another indication of
* ‘Casualty aversion’ as a factor of jus in bello will be discussed in the next chapter.
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