CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

4.2.1.1 The Impact of Casualty/Risk/Cost Aversion: Reluctance to Intervene
Reluctance to intervene is primarily an issue of jus ad bellum. However, as has been
frequently noted, jus ad and jus in are inter-related. Our reluctance to intervene
militarily can shape our conduct in a crisis – dictating a response short of decisive
intervention, for example, which may have moral consequences. Just war doctrine
requires, of course, that military force be a last resort. Nevertheless, a case can easily be
made that there have been occasions on which a much better outcome might have been
reached by an earlier or more whole-hearted resort to use of force (or indeed any such
resort at all). It is equally easy to make a case that in many such cases it has been
concern for the risks – in lives, treasure or political capital – that have deterred military
action. De Wijk 32 identifies three instruments of coercion that can be used: political,
economic and military. However, he notes 33 that the political instrument – demarches,
withdrawal of ambassadors, UN resolutions et cetera – have little effect on regimes
careless of international opinion and may even be used by such regimes as evidence, to
their own populations, of an external threat, in order to rally popular support or even to
justify internal repression. Economic sanctions can be used in a similar way.
Moreover, they can have harsh consequences for the ordinary population. De Wijk
points to the empirical evidence gathered in a study by Hufbauer, Scott and Elliot 34 ,
which considered 115 cases of economic sanctions from 1914 to 1990 and concluded
that only 40% were successful. This is because states can find alternatives (as Iraq did
throughout the period of UN sanctions from 1991-2003), can point to the sanctions as
evidence of external threat, and because multi-lateral action suffers from states’
different interest in ensuring effectiveness (again, witness Iraq and divisions over
sanctions even among EU states). Iraq also offers evidence for the argument that it is
the ordinary people who suffer most from a strong sanctions regime, contra the just war
criterion of discrimination and arguably that of proportionality too. Her health service,
for example, once on a par with those of major European powers, was devastated by the
long period of sanctions (or at least by the Baghdad regime’s manipulations of them). 35
The tardiness and then the nature of European nations’ reaction to the 1990s crises in
the Balkans stands as further evidence of the moral consequences of a reluctance to
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