Understanding global security - Peter Hough

MILITARY THREATS TO SECURITY FROM STATES
crystallized into a form that legitimized whatever the state felt was necessary for
its security or aggrandizement. Wars of colonial expansion presented perhaps the
clearest departure from the notion of justice but justifications for such campaigns
were made on the basis that the vanquished peoples would benefit from being
‘civilized’. Perhaps the most extreme articulation of this came from Gentili, who
declared the genocidal Spanish campaign against native Americans in the sixteenth
century to be a just war since the victims were cannibals (Gentili 1933).
The concept of total war in the twentieth century did most to set back the
just war tradition. The idea that the whole of society was directly involved during
war, rather than just the professional apparatus of government, had developed from
the nineteenth century, with the growth of military conscription and state-promoted
nationalism, but became fully realized in the era of the World Wars. From the
perspective of any of its participants, the First World War exceeded any notion of
proportionality and was entered into without much regard to diplomatic alternatives
to fighting. The Second World War, from the perspective of the allied forces, satisfied
the conditions of Jus ad bellum but possibly not principle (a) and most certainly not
principle (b) of Jus in bello. The arguments offered by the governments of the UK,
USSR and USA in defence of ignoring non-combatant immunity in the war against
Germany and Japan seemed to illustrate that the moral judgements facing governments
in the twentieth century were far starker than in previous ages. The British
blanket bombing of German cities brought criticism from some clerics in the Church
of England, but was generally deemed acceptable, since the enemy had done the
same thing, and necessary, since the just defeat of Germany required not only military
victories but the diminution of their war-making capacity. Soviet violence against
German invaders in driving them back to where they came from was horrific but
generally viewed in the same way since it was not disproportionate to what they had
suffered. The US atomic strikes on Japan were indiscriminate but maybe ultimately
saved lives since they finally brought to its knees an enemy apparently determined
to fight on well beyond any realistic hope of winning the war. In an age when the
means of waging war were so much greater than before it appeared that moral
niceties had become subsumed by necessity.
The Cold War institutionalized this amoral necessity into everyday international
politics. Nuclear deterrence rested on the notion that whole societies were legitimate
and realistic military targets which, in itself, must negate any notion of proportionality
as well as non-combatant discrimination. The rectification of what sort of
wrong could justify the annihilation of the whole population of a country, or even the
world?
The recession of such a scale of nuclear threat in the 1990s saw a concerted
effort to recapture all aspects of the just war tradition in the western-led wars of
the New World Order. During the Gulf War the US-led coalition limited itself to the
realization of its UN-authorized aims and did not seek to topple the Iraqi regime,
despite military and political pressure to do so. Saddam Hussein was forced out of
Kuwait but not out of office. The war was also conducted along lines which sought
to minimize civilian casualties through the use of ‘smart’ weaponry better able to
target military and official state sites than in bombing campaigns of earlier eras.
Similar sorts of campaigns were waged by NATO against Yugoslavia in 1999 and by
the USA and UK against Afghanistan in 2001–2 and Iraq in 2003. The 1999 Kosovan
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