CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

Degree of international consensus
Intervention an option
Degree of Urgency or Vital National Interest
Figure 3-3 International Consensus versus Urgency When Determining Legitimacy of Intervention
We have to accept, then, that if we reserve ultimately to the UN or any similar supra-
national body then, for all the reasons considered in Chapter 2, we will rarely see
sufficient and timely enough action to prevent actions that ‘shock the conscience of
humanity’. Such a realisation is hardly new as this extract from a letter, written in 1968
to the New York Times, shows:
… I don’t care much about international law, Biafra or Nigeria. Babies are
dying …
We still have food for export. Let’s get it to them any way we can,
dropping it from the skies, unloading it from armed ships, blasting it in with
cannons if that will work. I can’t believe there is much political cost in feeding
babies, but if there is let’s pay it; if we are going to be hated that’s the loveliest
of grounds.
Forget the blather about international law, sovereignty and selfdetermination,
all that abstract garbage; babies are starving to death. 167
3.3.5 Humanitarian Intervention: Tentative Conclusion
The tentative conclusion that must inevitably be drawn from this debate, is that the
legalist paradigm – indeed any legal framework – simply cannot resolve the dilemma so
eloquently articulated by Kofi Annan (see p181) between the political sovereignty and
territorial integrity of states on the one hand, and the imperative to act, through use of
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Intervention unacceptable