CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

crime is in itself a crime. The difficulty then is that the doctrine of preventive war that
is at least implied by the National Security Strategy could itself, from a moral
standpoint, also be seen as creating the wrongful act invoking a justified self-defence
response. 199
Arguments for greater permissiveness in pre-emptive war to counter terrorism are based
on a view that the traditional presumption against pre-emption is itself flawed when
terrorism is brought into the equation. The UN Charter is founded on a firm
understanding that use of force can only be justified when it is defensive. A world in
which pre-emption is an accepted norm is a dangerous one because any state may
believe it is about to be attacked and, therefore, attack its potential attacker. The
attacked state similarly may detect an imminent attack and attempt to pre-empt; a
viscous circle of fear and anticipatory attack is established. By contrast, a world in
which there is a widely respected norm of no-first-use, whilst it may not be entirely safe
– there may always be transgressors – is a considerably safer one. Henry Shue puts the
case thus:
The world of no-first-use is far from being a world of full security or a worryfree
world. One must always worry to some extent about norm-violators. A
nation that violates the norm and attacks in spite of it may inflict terrible damage
on its victim. But the world with the well-established norm of no-first-use has
one huge advantage: namely, it is a world from which a major reason for starting
wars has been removed. The reason that has been removed is the reasonable fear
that the price of not attacking first is most likely to be suffering an attack
oneself. 200
In the case of terrorism, it is suggested, this argument no longer holds: the terrorist is
not, in the sense we generally understand the term, a rational actor whose actions
towards us depend on ours toward him; it is not fear of attack by us that motivates the
terrorist to attack us. He intends to attack us anyway so our best defence is a pre-
emptive strike.
If we leave aside the semantic, but important, argument that terrorism is a tactic not an
enemy, the argument is in any case flawed in that it assumes that all terrorists are
similar in motivation and (ir)rationality and it provides a case at best for pre-emption
but not for preventive war. Henry Shue objects on two grounds: firstly, an admittedly
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