Was Iraq an unjust war? A debate on the
Iraq war and reflections on Libya*
David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
The case against the war: Round I
David Fisher
There has been much recent debate about whether the 2003 Iraq war was legal,
with both Tony Blair and his Attorney-General summoned before the Chilcot
Inquiry to give evidence on this point. But a more fundamental question is
whether the war was moral.
On this question the Chilcot Inquiry has been more reticent, perhaps reflecting
a more general scepticism in society about whether moral questions can have objective answers. But there is a way of thinking, going back to Aquinas, Aristotle and
beyond, that insists that there are rationally based ways to answer such questions.
The just war tradition sets a number of tests to be met if a war is to be just.
It has to be undertaken for a just cause, with right intention, with competent
authority and as a last resort; the harm judged likely to result should not outweigh
the good achieved, taking into account the probability of success; in its conduct,
the principles of proportion and non-combatant immunity have to be met; and
the war must end in a just peace.
All of this may appear deliberately over-prescriptive—erecting so many hurdles
that war would become impossible. But the just war tradition recognizes that
wars can be just and may sometimes be necessary. What it insists upon are two
fundamental requirements, as simple as they are compelling: Is there a just cause?
And will the harm likely to be caused by military action outweigh the good to
be achieved by that cause? In other words, is the war in question likely to bring
about more good than harm?
So how does the Iraq war fare against these criteria?
*
This article is based on a debate between Dr David Fisher and Professor Nigel Biggar held at Chatham House
on 22 March 2011, in conjunction with the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament,
to mark the launch of David Fisher’s book Morality and war: can war be just in the twenty-first century? (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011). A fuller account of David Fisher’s views on the Iraq war are in the book, esp.
ch. 10.
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
Just cause
Different reasons for the war were adduced at different times by the British and
US governments. Indeed, in the months preceding the war so many reasons were
adduced, particularly by the US administration, that it was not always clear what
the rationale for military action was. But the declared basis for the military operation common to both governments was, according to the British government’s
published war aims: ‘to rid Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction and associated programmes …, as set out in relevant UNSCRs’.1 Military operations were
undertaken to enforce the disarmament obligations imposed on Saddam Hussein’s
regime by the UN and to remove the threat to regional peace and security.
Saddam’s disappearing WMD
We now know from the Iraq Survey Group that Iraq did not have weapons of
mass destruction (WMD). The Iraq Survey Group concluded that ‘Iraq, by the
mid-1990s, was essentially free of militarily significant WMD stocks’, although
Saddam retained a strategic ambition and capability to reacquire them once the
sanctions regime had ended.2 Even this startling disclosure would not necessarily
invalidate the coalition’s disarmament objective as a just cause if there were reasonable and strong grounds for believing that Saddam had such weapons. So were
there such grounds?
The belief reflected the advice of all the relevant experts, including the UN
weapons inspectors. Saddam had had biological and chemical weapons and had
used chemical weapons. After the first Gulf war it was discovered that his stocks
of chemical and biological weapons had been much higher, and his nuclear
programme further advanced, than intelligence had suggested. So there were
grounds for concern that, while substantial stocks had been destroyed, Saddam
might have retained some chemical and biological weapons and might even be
seeking to reconstitute his nuclear programme. Having underestimated his
capability before, the analysts were keen—perhaps too keen—to avoid making
the same mistake again.
Their concerns were reinforced by the fact that Saddam behaved as if he had
the weapons. He refused to cooperate fully with the UN weapon inspectors, and
withdrew cooperation altogether in 1998. It was difficult to understand why, if
he had nothing to hide, he did not cooperate with the inspectors to secure the
removal of sanctions. No western democratic leader would behave in such a way,
incurring the penalties of sanctions and threatened military action. This comparative judgement was, however, flawed. For Saddam was not a western democratic
leader but an Arab despot, to whom the standards of western rationality and
democratic values did not apply.
1
‘Iraq: Military Campaign Objectives’, para. 1. The text is quoted in full as Annex C to The review of intelligence
of weapons of mass destruction, report of a committee of Privy Counsellors, chaired by Lord Butler (Butler Report),
HC898 (London: House of Commons, 14 July 2004).
2
Iraq Survey Group, Final report, 30 Sept. 2004, vol. I, p. 34, http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/
report/2004/isg-final-report, accessed 2 Feb. 2010.
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
The belief that Saddam had WMD was, therefore, mistaken but not unreasonable. But was this belief the real reason why military action was undertaken?
Right intention
It is not enough to have a just cause: the military action must be undertaken for the
sake of that cause and so with right intention. Many opponents of the war thought
that the disarming of Iraq was only a pretext and that there must have been other
more sinister reasons for military action.
The motivations of the US and UK governments in the drive towards war
were undoubtedly mixed, with considerations of realpolitik jostling uneasily with
higher-minded concerns. Criticism can, in particular, be levelled at the way the
case for war was presented, including the unqualified claims made in the intelligence dossier published by the UK government in September 2002 and the unjustified linkage made by the US government between Saddam’s regime and Al-Qaeda
terrorists. Both made the threat appear more direct, immediate and serious than
it was. But none of this provides grounds for doubting that both governments
genuinely believed that Saddam had a WMD capability and were concerned over
the consequent threat to peace and security in the region and more widely. That
belief was mistaken but not unreasonable. So the objective of disarming Iraq of its
WMD capability in enforcement of UN resolutions could have constituted a just
cause for military action. There are, however, two crucial qualifications.
First, war inevitably causes suffering. The just war criteria, therefore, require
strong evidence of the gravity and likelihood of the threat to be countered. The
evidential bar is set high by the just war criteria, not arbitrarily, but by the grim
logic of war, whereby the suffering caused is certain while the gains are less
certain—particularly the gains from action against threats, such as that posed by
Iraq, that are not actual or imminent.
It was thus not enough to have a reasonable belief that Saddam had WMD;
that belief needed to be based on strong evidence of the seriousness of the threat.
But the intelligence reports on which the judgements of Saddam’s capability were
based were ‘sporadic and patchy’, in the words of the Butler report,3 or, in the
case of the Iraqi defector known as ‘Curveball’, flaky in the extreme.4 The high
evidential standards set by the just war criteria were, therefore, not met.
The second and related difficulty is that since the military action to disarm Iraq
of its WMD capability was being undertaken to enforce UN Security Council
resolutions, it was important that the US and UK governments had the required
competent authority to act on behalf of the UN.
3
4
Butler Report, para. 330.
Martin Chulov and Helen Pidd, ‘Defector admits to WMD lies that triggered Iraq war’ Tuesday 15 February
2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/Feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war, accessed 16 Feb.
2011.
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
Competent authority
Lord Goldsmith produced an elegant legal argument to show that the coalition
had competent authority inherited from earlier UNSCRs. But whatever its legal
merits—and these were disputed—the weakness of such an approach is that a
justification for the claim to be embarking on war on behalf of the UN required
more than an argument to show that force had been authorized by the UN in
the past; it needed evidence that such military enforcement action was still the
avowed wish of the international community. This was why the British government had been rightly keen to secure a second resolution explicitly authorizing
the use of force at the present time. The failure to secure support for that resolution was itself evidence of the lack of international consensus for military action.
The failure arose, moreover, not from a threatened veto by one or two recalcitrant
nations but because there was no broad alliance favouring action. Nor was there an
urgent humanitarian crisis to be averted, such as might have justified action, had
there been substantial international support, even without UNSCR approval, as
was the case with the 1999 NATO operations in Kosovo. This lack of international
support cast doubt on the claim that the US and British governments had the
required competent authority. It also reflected a widespread concern that military
action was being undertaken too soon and not as a last resort.
Last resort
UNSCR Resolution 1441, passed on 9 November 2002, while declaring Iraq in
material breach of its disarmament obligations, had given Saddam a final chance
to prove otherwise. The UNMOVIC inspectors had arrived in Iraq only on 28
November 2002 and had not yet had time to complete their work. In their 7 March
report they had begun to report a greater degree of Iraqi cooperation. Many felt
that the inspectors should have been given more time.
There were genuine concerns whether military action was being undertaken
as a last resort and, in view of these, there was a reluctance to support a second
resolution authorizing force. This, in turn, cast doubt on whether the condition
of competent authority was met and so reinforced the concern that there was not
a just cause for action. Doubt over whether each of these conditions individually
was met did not amount to a decisive argument against war. But the doubts taken
together reinforced each other and so strengthened the overall concern that there
was not a sufficient just cause.
It is, moreover, the single most serious charge against those who planned the
Iraq war that they massively underestimated the harm that would be caused by
military action.
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
Principle of proportion
The next just war requirement is that before war is begun a careful assessment
should be undertaken to seek to ensure that the harm likely to be caused does not
outweigh the good achieved, taking into account the probability of success.
Judged against the initial military campaign, this condition was met. Casualties
were much lower than in the first Gulf war. Against the limited casualties could
be set the removal of the threat to regional peace and security achieved by the
overthrow of Saddam’s regime and the opportunity this furnished to disarm Iraq
of its WMD.
So it looked in April 2003. Eight years later the balance sheet looks different.
No WMD were found. Meanwhile, the casualties, military and civilian, have
continued to mount, with US military deaths to date at over 4,400, British at 179
and civilian deaths at over 100,000.5 Most of these casualties are not the result
of coalition military action but stem from the devastating attacks that the Iraqis
have been making on one another as insurgent groups struggle for power. The
overall totals also mask recent improvements both politically and in much reduced
casualty levels.
These improvements are significant. But the cost of getting there has been high
and, in particular, much higher than anticipated by those planning the invasion.
Coalition leaders could not reasonably be expected to have forecast the precise
casualty levels that would follow military action. But they are open to criticism
for not having given sufficient consideration to what would be the effects of
regime change and for not having formulated robust plans to re-establish civil
governance promptly thereafter and effect a peaceful transition to democracy. Just
as they had undertaken worst-case assessments of Saddam’s WMD capability, so
they had undertaken best-case assessments of what would happen after the regime
had been changed. Coalition forces were as a result ill-prepared to deal with the
consequent breakdown of law and onset of a violent insurgency.
As casualties have mounted in the eight years since the invasion, it has become
increasingly difficult to maintain that more good than harm was produced by
military action, however evil and oppressive the Saddam regime had undoubtedly
been. Nor, set against the good to be achieved, would any government have been
able to secure support in 2003 for military action expected to cost over 100,000
civilian lives. Crucially, the careful assessment of likely consequences in advance of
military operations required by the just war tradition was not undertaken. Nor
was there adequate planning of how to achieve the prompt restoration of peaceful
conditions after military operations.
5
The military casualty figures are collated from government sources by the Brookings Institution and
published in the Brookings Iraq Index: see http://www.brookings.edu/iraqindex, accessed 31 Jan. 2011. The
total civilian casualty figures are documented civilian deaths from violence as estimated by the Iraq Body
Count on 31 Jan. 2011: see http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database, accessed 31 Jan. 2011.
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Jus in bello: proportion and non-combatant immunity
Turning to the conduct of the war, the just war tradition requires that the harm
judged likely to result from individual military actions should not be disproportionate to the good achieved, and that non-combatant casualties should be
minimized.
In the initial military campaign the use of force was proportionate and successful
efforts were made to minimize civilian casualties. But in the ensuing counterinsurgency operations there have been lapses on both counts. Excessive force was used,
particularly during the first year of the occupation, for example in the assault on
Fallujah, and civilians were ill-treated both by US forces, most notoriously at Abu
Ghraib, and by British soldiers in Basra, among them Baha Mousa, who suffered
unlawful death in custody.
The verdict
The Iraq war was, like most wars, fought from a mixture of motives. But, in
the main, the reasons for undertaking the war were honourable and the concerns
over WMD proliferation genuinely held. The tragedy of the Iraq conflict is that
those responsible were trying to make the world a better and safer place and
were supported by military forces that have, on the whole, exhibited remarkable
restraint and courage. But, as the just war doctrine, forged from painful experience over the centuries, teaches, noble aspirations are not enough to justify armed
conflict.
The war failed fully to meet any of the just war criteria. There were doubts
whether the operation was undertaken with competent authority and as a last
resort. These doubts, in turn, fuelled the concerns that there was not sufficient
just cause. Doubts about the justice of the cause, in turn, reinforced concerns
over whether the principle of proportion could be met—concerns both over the
good to be achieved and over the harm war would bring about. Crucially, no
adequate assessment was undertaken before military action was authorized to seek
to ensure that the harm likely to result would not outweigh the good achieved.
Nor were there robust plans for how to establish a just peace after the initial
military campaign had been concluded.
The doubts over whether individual conditions were met were grounds for
concern. The charge against the Iraq war is not, however, that it fell somewhat
short of a number of conditions, but rather that such individual failures, when
taken together, reinforced each other, building up cumulatively to support the
conclusion that the war was undertaken without sufficient just cause and without
adequate planning on how to achieve a just outcome. It thus failed the two key
tests that have to be met before a war can be justly undertaken, designed to ensure
that military action is only initiated if more good than harm is likely to result.
Our political leaders may have had noble objectives in embarking on military
action. But moral fervour is not enough to ensure right decisions are taken. Moral
reasoning needs to be guided by the judicious exercise of practical wisdom, ‘the
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
habit of sound judgement about practical situations’.6 Political leaders are required
to exercise this virtue in its highest form, which Aquinas called ‘statesmanship’.7
It was such statesmanship that was signally lacking in the decision to embark on
military action in 2003.
The case for the war: Round I
Nigel Biggar
The flaws of war
I agree: the invasion and occupation of Iraq were gravely flawed. The claim that
Iraq possessed WMD destruction was, it now seems, false. The reason for this,
however, lies not in government deception but in errors of interpretation by a
wide range of intelligence agencies—not only the British and American, but
also the French, the German and the Russian.8 A second error was that the US
armed forces, still reacting against their experience in Vietnam, were ill-disposed
to undertake counterinsurgency operations.9 Both of these errors were grave, but
not, I think, morally culpable. On the other hand, the following grave errors were
morally culpable.
The first of these was Washington’s severe underestimation of what it would
take to rebuild Iraq after the invasion—especially the number of troops necessary
to secure law and order, which is the precondition of any political flourishing.
Were it not for Donald Rumsfeld’s indulgence of the vice of wishful thinking,
this could have been avoided.10
Next was Paul Bremer’s mistake of disbanding the Iraqi army and police,
throwing lots of young men, many of them armed, out onto the streets with no
legitimate way of earning an income and thus fuelling insurgency. The intent was
well-meaning: namely, the de-Ba’athification of the state’s security institutions.
But it was imprudent, as was foreseen—but not by a Bremer made impatient by a
managerial mentality that brushes aside complexity and ambiguity in its lust for
clean, decisive solutions.11
And then there was the wicked physical and psychological abuse of prisoners
at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
So I agree: the invasion and occupation of Iraq were afflicted by grave errors,
some of them morally culpable. But then so was the war against Hitler. In his
6
7
Peter Geach, Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 160.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae,50,1, in St Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae, vol. 36, Prudence, trans. Thomas
Gilby OP (London: Blackfriars / Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1974).
8
For a fuller account of this point, and of those in the following two paragraphs, see Nigel Biggar, ‘Invading
Iraq: what are the morals of the story?’, International Affairs 87: 1, Jan. 2011, pp. 29–30.
9
Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: the American military adventure in Iraq (London: Penguin, 2007), esp. pp. 264–7.
10
Donald Rumsfeld’s spokesman, Larry Di Rita, dismissed the claim that the invasion needed to show early
benefits to the Iraqi people by saying, ‘We don’t owe the people of Iraq anything. We’re giving them their
freedom. That’s enough’: George Packer, The assassins’ gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus,
Giroux, 2005), p. 133. And according to George Packer, ‘In his [Rumsfeld’s] view and that of others in
the administration … freedom was the absence of constraint … Remove a thirty-five-year-old tyranny and
democracy will grow in its place’ (Assassins’ gate, pp. 136–7).
11
Packer, Assassins’ gate, p. 190.
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1941 attempts to bolster American support for Britain, President Roosevelt ‘sexed
up’ the Greer incident into a Nazi act of aggression;12 and he claimed to possess a
‘secret map’ of Nazi designs on Latin America—a map far more dodgy than any
Iraq dossier, since its very probable forgery by the British was probably known by
Roosevelt.13 Further, the Allied prosecution of the war was morally vitiated by
Bomber Harris’s vengeful hatred, Montgomery’s ally-alienating conceit, Patton’s
reckless vainglory and Zhukov’s wanton ruthlessness. Further still, it was also
morally vitiated by the RAF’s (arguably) indiscriminate bombing of German
cities, by the not uncommon shooting in cold blood of German prisoners of war
by US troops during the Battle of Normandy,14 and by the Red Army’s rape of
an estimated 2 million German women.15
And while Allied efforts liberated western Europe from the murderous hands
of Hitler, which was very good, it also delivered eastern Europe up to the tender
mercies of Stalin, which was very bad.
Most wars, even just ones, are morally flawed. Therefore the fact that the Iraq
venture involved serious moral errors does not yet tell us that it was unjust overall.
The limits of law
Many people seem to think that the invasion was clearly illegal, and that therefore
it was basically unjust. Neither is true. Whether or not the authorization of the
United Nations Security Council was given is a matter of unresolved dispute. UN
resolutions are the fruit of political consensus; and political consensus is often
achieved through creative ambiguity. Accordingly, some understood UN Resolution 1441 to be sufficient to authorize military action; others did not. There is
no court with international authority to decide one way or another. What we
have instead are international lawyers, who advocate a case for a particular interpretation of the legal text in terms of its context—in particular, the history of
its negotiation and the analogy or otherwise between the political circumstances
of the early 2000s and those of the early 1990s. In other words, the legal interpretation is neither pure nor plain, but depends upon a political assessment and
its moral assumptions—about both of which there is ample scope for reasonable controversy. Therefore if by ‘clearly’ one means ‘incontrovertibly’, the Iraq
invasion is not ‘clearly illegal’.
However, let us suppose that the Security Council’s authorization was lacking,
and that the invasion was illegal. Even if that were so, it could not be the final word,
since positive law is always subject to moral law. If that were not so, then those
who plotted to assassinate Hitler in July 1944 would be criminal traitors simply (as
they were in the eyes of German law until at least the late 1990s), whereas in fact
12
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American foreign policy, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1979), pp. 286–9.
Nicholas John Cull, Selling war: the British propaganda campaign against American ‘neutrality’ in World War II (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 168–75.
14
Antony Beevor, D-Day: the battle for Normandy (London: Viking, 2009), pp. 24, 106, 121, 153, 158, 438.
15
Antony Beevor, Berlin: the downfall 1945 (London: Viking, 2002), p. 410.
13
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they were also, and foremost, moral heroes. Beyond the legal question always lies
the moral question. No one may park his or her conscience in the space marked
‘law’.
The force of this assertion is all the more evident when we consider the fact that
the power of the UN to uphold international law is severely compromised by the
politics of the Security Council.16 Take the following analogy. A neighbour a few
houses away is murdering his children. It is against the law for you to intervene
directly. You call the police to ask them to intervene instead. Before they can
intervene, however, the police have to get authorization from a committee. Any
member of this committee can prevent authorization by issuing a veto. In this
case a committee member is related to the householder or has investments in his
business. He therefore vetoes any authorization for the police to intervene to save
your neighbour’s children. What will you do? Will you break the law and intervene yourself ? Or will you stand by and watch the children being slaughtered?
That is the situation in which current international law lands us. On the one
hand, it forbids individual states to intervene militarily in the affairs of a sovereign
state, unless authorized by the Security Council to do so. On the other hand, it
makes the power of the Security Council to issue authorization hostage to the
political interests—sometimes cynical—of its members. Thus NATO did not seek
Security Council authorization to intervene in Kosovo, since Russia would have
vetoed it because of its cultural ties with Serbia. Strictly, then, NATO’s intervention was illegal. Nevertheless, most people now regard it as legitimate—by
which they mean ‘morally justified’. It follows that even if the invasion of Iraq
was illegal, that does not suffice to make it immoral.
Civilian deaths
Some suppose that the scale of civilian casualties in Iraq establishes the immorality
of the intervention. Most discussions cite a figure of between 100,000 and 160,000,
which is indeed a terrible cost. Yet the liberation of Europe from Nazi domination
cost the lives of 70,000 French civilians and about 500,000 German ones through
Allied bombing. My point here is not that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant as evil as
Adolf Hitler (although the difference between them was more one of opportunity
than of inclination). Nor do I intend a general analogy between the war against
Hitler and the invasion of Iraq. No: my point is rather that Allied belligerency
in the Second World War, which is very widely regarded as just, nevertheless
involved massive civilian casualties; and that therefore massive civilian casualties
in Iraq do not by themselves suffice to render the 2003 invasion unjust.
Moreover, whereas the deaths of French and German civilians in the Second
World War were the direct responsibility of the British and Americans, the vast
majority of Iraqi civilian deaths is directly attributable to foreign or native insurgents. Not being a utilitarian, I do not regard an agent as equally responsible for
all the effects of his actions. No agent is primarily responsible for the reactions of
16
For a fuller account of this point see Biggar, ‘Invading Iraq’, pp. 33–5.
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other agents. Sunni or Shi’i insurgents and Al-Qaeda agents were not compelled
to send suicide bombers into crowded marketplaces or to hack off the heads of
hostages. They chose to do so. And even if they were motivated by nationalist or
Islamist resentment at foreign or western intrusion, that is not a sufficient warrant.
Neither nationalism nor Islamism is its own moral justification. Sometimes foreign
intervention is morally right, and should be accepted. So, yes, the occupying
powers had an obligation to maintain law and order, in which they failed initially.
But the insurgents also had a moral obligation not to target civilians intentionally;
and that is one in which they have failed persistently.
Just cause: an atrocious regime
Whether or not the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq were basically just or
unjust is decided by three standard criteria: just cause, last resort and right intention. Was there sufficient just cause? According to the Christian tradition of just
war thinking, to which I adhere, just belligerency is motivated by love for neighbours in the specific form of righting a grave wrong done to them. One kind of
such wrong is a state’s murder of its own citizens on a massive scale. Let us call
this state-atrocity.
Was Saddam Hussein’s regime guilty of such atrocity? Undoubtedly. The
1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds killed at very least 100,000, some by way
of chemical WMD.17 And between 1991 and 2003, according to western human
rights groups, at least a further 300,000 people were victims of state violence.18 So
Saddam Hussein’s regime was responsible for the murder of at least 400,000 of its
own people in the 15 years from 1988 to 2003. That certainly makes it atrocious;
according to Human Rights Watch, it also makes it genocidal.19 This is sufficient
just cause for military intervention. Note: it is not sufficient to make intervention
morally right, because there are other criteria yet to be met; but it is sufficient to
satisfy the single criterion of just cause.
One implication of my view of just cause is that it makes Iraq’s possession of
WMD a secondary issue. It augments the just cause, and it gives remote peoples
like the Americans and the British an interest in taking that cause up, but it is not
necessary to make it sufficient. But what exactly would have been so evil about
Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD, especially nuclear weapons? Three things:
first, it would have made the regime immune from hindrance as it perpetrated
further domestic atrocities; second, it could have made the regime immune from
retaliation the next time it invaded a Kuwait; third and last, but not at all least, it
would have enabled the regime to supply WMD to Al-Qaeda or other terrorists
seeking to maximize civilian casualties. If you find alarm over Saddam Hussein’s
possession of WMD hard to credit, it might help if you were to imagine how
17
Anne Clwyd, ‘Why did it take you so long to get here?’, in Thomas Cushman, ed., A matter of principle:
humanitarian arguments for war in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California, 2005), pp. 311–12.
18
William Shawcross, Allies: the U.S., Britain, Europe, and the war in Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), p. 160.
19
Human Rights Watch, ‘Genocide in Iraq: the Anfal campaign against the Kurds’, July 1993, http://www.hrw.
org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/, accessed 28 March 2011.
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things would now stand if Colonel Qadhafi had chemical, biological and nuclear
weapons at his disposal.
Last resort: incontinent containment
The fact that Iraq turned out not to possess WMD certainly reduces the problem’s
urgency, but it does not eliminate the problem. No one doubts that Saddam
Hussein was intent on resuming his efforts to acquire WMD the moment the UN
inspectors left and the coalition troops withdrew from his borders. This brings us
to the issue of last resort. Given the problem of Iraq’s persistent resolve to acquire
WMD, one solution was forcible regime change. But were there other, less costly,
equally effective options? The obvious candidate is containment.
What were the prospects of successful containment? Note that the question is not
whether containment had been effective, but whether it would have continued to be so.
I doubt it. Kenneth Pollack has argued that, before the invasion, containment was
collapsing beyond repair. Since 1997 France, Russia and China—all members of
the Security Council—had been pressing for a relaxation of sanctions and inspections, in order to obtain oil and military contracts and to collect debts owed. In
particular, China had been constructing a nationwide fibre-optic communication
system which would have enabled Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries to target American
and British aircraft in the no-fly zones.20
Now, of course, Pollack is famous for being a proponent of regime change; so
you might think that his views on containment are not trustworthy. If so, let me
point out that Thomas Ricks—whose damning account of the intervention bears
the indicative title Fiasco—both relies on Pollack and corroborates the Chinese
transgression.21 What is more, Ricks also suggests that maintaining the no-fly
zones in northern and southern Iraq was so straining the US military that they
could not have been enforced much longer.22
And, one must add, the fact that Security Council members themselves were
breaking sanctions before the invasion, when it was generally believed that Iraq had
WMD, hardly bolsters confidence in their resolve to tighten containment afterwards.
Therefore it seems to me that the tragically famous Dr David Kelly, Britain’s
expert on biological weapons and a former UN weapons inspector, was correct
when he wrote shortly before the invasion that, ‘after 12 unsuccessful years of
UN supervision of disarmament, military force regrettably appears to be the
only way of finally and conclusively disarming Iraq … The long-term threat …
remains Iraq’s development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction—something only regime change will avert.’23
20
Kenneth Pollack, The threatening storm: the case for invading Iraq (New York: Random House / Council on
Foreign Relations, 2002), ch. 7, ‘The erosion of containment’, esp. pp. 224–7.
Fiasco, pp. 27, 453.
Fiasco, pp. 43–5.
David Kelly, ‘Only regime change will avert the threat’, Observer, 31 Aug. 2003. This is a reprint of an article
that is described as written ‘days before the Iraq war’. The emphasis is mine.
21
Ricks,
22
Ricks,
23
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
Right intention, proven serious
Just cause and last resort are two of the decisive criteria. The third is right intention. It is not enough for there to be a wrong to react to. One must react with
the intention of righting or correcting it. And if one is sincere in one’s intention, one will give thought to what that righting will require, and will commit
corresponding resources to realizing it. The coalition did not lack postwar plans,
nor did they fail to commit resources for reconstruction; but the initial plans
and resources were woefully and culpably inadequate. Nevertheless, it is morally
significant that, after their initial failures, the occupying powers did not walk
away. They sought to compensate for their errors, over six years, and at great cost.
And judging by General Petraeus’s ‘surge’ and its aftermath, their compensatory
action has met with considerable success.24 Right and sincere intention was not
lacking at the beginning, and over time that intention has proved itself committed
and serious.
Intending something seriously, however, is not the same as achieving it. There
is such a thing as noble failure. Well-meaning and earnest intentions can be
frustrated by accidents of history: the just may be robbed of victory by a change
in the wind. And sometimes the fate of what one rightly, sincerely and seriously
intends inevitably moves out of one’s own hands and into others’. Whether, and
how far, the Iraq intervention will achieve a political regime that is a proportionate improvement on Saddam Hussein’s depends increasingly on what Iraqis do
and fail to do, and whether their efforts meet with good fortune or bad.
What the settled upshot will be is not clear—and it cannot be clear. Different
people of different political persuasions and different temperaments give different
estimates. Iraqis interviewed by Guardian journalists are invariably apocalyptic
about their country’s present and future. On the other hand, Canon Andrew
White, who lived under Saddam and now pastors the beleaguered Christian
community in Baghdad, wrote in March that ‘while things are still awful, they
are slowly improving. Despite the atrocities, the fear of the Saddam regime is gone
and we do have democracy.’25
As for me, I plant my flag in the position articulated by the spokesman of
the group of young professional Iraqis who visited Christ Church in Oxford last
March. At the end of our meeting, I asked them bluntly: ‘Should the invasion of
2003 have happened?’ Without hesitating, the spokesman responded: ‘It was good
that it happened. It could have been done better. And it isn’t over.’
24
Thomas Ricks, Gamble: General Petraeus and the untold story of the American surge in Iraq, 2006–8 (London: Allen
Lane, 2009), ch. 11.
25
In an email to the author, dated 10 March 2011.
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
The case against the war: Round II, and reflections on Libya
David Fisher
Nigel Biggar offers a valiant ethical defence of the Iraq war, with much of which
I agree. But I have three main difficulties with his argument.
First, he is justifying a war that might have been fought rather than the war
that was actually fought. The reasons he offers for the war are not those that the
British government actually used. He suggests that Iraq’s possession of WMD
was a secondary issue; but that is not how it was presented by the British government for whom it was the primary ground for war. The just war tradition looks
unkindly on political leaders changing their reasons for action as wars run into
difficulties, reflecting concern over the abuse to which such licence might be prone
in the hands of unscrupulous politicians. In war, as one just war commentator
remarked, ‘you have to call your shots, as in billiards’.26
Second, the additional reasons he advances do not, in my view, furnish the
requisite missing justification. Biggar argues that the fact that there were no WMD
matters less than that Saddam was intent on resuming his efforts to acquire them,
once sanctions were lifted. This is the argument also used by Mr Blair in his evidence
to the Chilcot Inquiry on 29 January 2010, where he counselled that we should be
asking not the March 2003 question but the 2010 question: What kind of threat
would we be facing now if no action had been taken against Saddam in 2003?27
Saddam’s strategic intentions were a legitimate cause for concern. But it seems
doubtful that there would have been much support in 2003 for a case for war
based on what might happen in 2010. For, if our concern in 2003 had been based
solely on Saddam’s strategic intent, rather than actual possession, it would always
have been possible to argue that there was time for other options to be deployed
to prevent him fulfilling his strategic intent, including rigorous arms inspections
and better targeted (so-called ‘smart’) sanctions.
Such alternative options were not, as Biggar notes, without their difficulties;
but nor were they without their successes. Indeed, the previous arms inspection
regime had been rather more successful than is commonly supposed. Saddam did
not, after all, have any WMD, a fact that the newly reinstalled inspectors would
no doubt have been able to confirm had they not been prematurely withdrawn
to make way for military action. Given the availability of alternative options to
thwart Saddam’s strategic intention, the requirement of last resort would not have
been met. What gave the case for military action in 2003 its force and urgency was
the belief that Saddam did actually possess the weapons.
Biggar also suggests that there were humanitarian grounds for overthrowing a
brutal tyrant, as Mr Blair argued in a speech a year after the war.28 The objection
to this claim is twofold. First, as Blair himself acknowledged, this had not been
the reason given by the British government at the time. Second, since the benefits
26
27
Brian Orend, The morality of war (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 49.
Rt Hon. Tony Blair, evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry, 29 Jan. 2010, www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/transcripts/oral
evidence, accessed 2 Feb. 2010.
28
Rt Hon. Tony Blair MP, speech in Sedgefield constituency, 5 March 2004.
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
of regime change are uncertain, while the harm caused by military action is only
too evident, just war thinking insists that the grounds for military action to effect
regime change need to be compelling—for example, to put an end to an actual
or imminent humanitarian catastrophe. Otherwise we risk bringing about more
harm than good.
Such humanitarian grounds might have justified action in 1988 to prevent
Saddam’s atrocities in Anfal, to which Biggar alludes. They were the basis for
coalition operations in Iraq in 1991 to protect the Kurds in ‘safe havens’ from
attacks by Saddam’s forces. But the difficulty with using this argument to justify
action in Iraq in 2003 is that no such humanitarian catastrophe was then taking
place, nor was one imminently expected. There was just the steady brutal oppression of his people by a ruthless dictator. In the absence of such a crisis, the humanitarian case for military action is weak.
My third difficulty is of a more philosophical nature. Biggar claims that the
justice of the decision to go to war is judged against three decisive criteria: just
cause, last resort and right intention. But he curiously omits to mention the criterion of proportion. This test is not an optional extra but is central to the just war
assessment. It is well summarized by Vitoria: ‘Care must be taken to ensure that
the evil effects of war do not outweigh the possible benefits sought by waging it.’29
Assessing the consequences of our actions is not all that matters in moral
reasoning, as consequentialists mistakenly suppose. Far from it: intentions, moral
principles and the virtues needed to enact those principles are all crucial.30 But
consequences are part of the moral reckoning. It is surely not unreasonable to
require of our political leaders that before embarking on military action they should
undertake a careful assessment to seek to ensure that military action is not likely to
bring about more harm than good. In so applying the principle of proportion, a
comparative judgement has to be made between the good to be achieved and the
harm likely to result. Where the good to be achieved or harm averted is very great,
such as defeating the monstrous tyranny of Nazism, the casualties worth bearing
may be high. But where the good to be achieved is less clear-cut, the harm that
could be justified in its achievement is correspondingly reduced.
Such assessment is not easy since, in war as in other contexts, moral judgements
have to be made in conditions of uncertainty. The assessment needs to be regularly
updated, such updating easing some of the difficulties over the initial assessment.
It requires the judicious exercise of the virtue of practical wisdom. But however
difficult, a careful assessment of the foreseeable consequences of military action
has to be undertaken. The charge against the coalition leaders is that they did not
adequately do this. They thus acted with a degree of recklessness. They failed to
exercise the necessary practical wisdom in thinking through the effects of military
action to impose regime change and they did not formulate robust plans to deal
with its aftermath. This was a crucial just war test that they failed.
29
Vitoria, On the law of war, 3.1., sect. 17, in Vitoria: political writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1991), 315.
30
This view of ethics, which I call ‘virtuous consequentialism’, is developed in Morality and war, especially ch. 7.
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
The differences between Biggar’s position and mine can be illustrated further
by considering current coalition operations in Libya.
Is the coalition intervention in Libya just?
The injustice of the Iraq intervention occasioned much debate around the idea
that this might mark an end to the period of liberal interventionism, making it
difficult to justify future interventions or garner international support for them.
The logic of the claim that an unjust intervention in Iraq would undermine the
legitimacy of future humanitarian operations was never entirely clear. Because
one intervention, not itself undertaken for humanitarian reasons, was unjust, it
hardly follows that all humanitarian interventions are unjust. Nonetheless, it did
appear that the appetite and capacity of the international community for intervention might have waned after the war in Iraq, not least given the heavy engagement
of forces there and in Afghanistan.
This feeling seemed, moreover, to be borne out by the endless wrangling in
the international community as Qadhafi’s forces set about brutally suppressing
the popular uprising against his tyranny. The popular uprisings in Egypt and
Tunisia had successfully led to regime change, but that in Libya seemed likely
to be suppressed by the determination of one tyrant to use force to hold onto
power. By mid-March 2011 Qadhafi’s forces had regained control of most of the
areas occupied by the rebels and were about to attack the main rebel stronghold
of Benghazi, a city of a million people which Qadhafi had threatened to clear
‘house by house’.
Contrary to the expectation of many pundits, at this moment the international community decided to act. On 17 March 2011, following an earlier plea for
help from the Arab League, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1973.
This resolution authorizes UN members ‘to take all the necessary measures to
protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan
Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi, while excluding a foreign occupation force
of any form on any part of Libyan territory’.31 US, UK and French air forces
shortly thereafter commenced operations to implement the resolution and other
countries subsequently joined the operation, including, importantly, the Arab
state of Qatar. NATO subsequently took over military command.
So is this intervention just, and how does it differ from that in Iraq? Let us
consider each of the just war criteria in turn.
Just cause The protection of innocent civilians from actual or imminent attack
constitutes a just cause. The 2005 UN summit endorsed the concept advanced
by the 2001 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
of an ‘international responsibility to protect’. This was based on the idea that
‘sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable
catastrophe—from mass murder and rape, from starvation—but when they are
31
www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2011/sc10200.doc.htm, accessed 31 March 2011.
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
unwilling or unable to do so … the responsibility must be borne by the broader
community of states’.32
Qadhafi has been not only unwilling to protect his people but actively engaged
in their slaughter. He has thereby forfeited his right to non-intervention and the
international community has a responsibility to try to prevent further massacres
of innocents. It is critical to this judgement that, in contrast to the situation in
Iraq in March 2003, the humanitarian catastrophe was actually taking place, so
underlining the urgent need for action.
Right intention Military action has to be undertaken for the sake of the just cause
and so with right intention. Critics of the Libyan intervention have claimed that
other less creditable motives are at work, including the prestige of political leaders
and the importance of Libyan oil. It is argued that it is inconsistent to intervene
in Libya but not Yemen or other states whose governments are also opposing
popular uprisings.
As always, political motivations are no doubt mixed. But there are no good
reasons for doubting that humanitarian motives are to the fore. There are also
strong humanitarian reasons for intervening in Libya but not elsewhere because
of the scale of suffering taking place there. It is, moreover, never a valid excuse
to fail to offer help in one case, where one can, because one cannot offer help
­everywhere. We should do good where we can, even if we cannot do it everywhere.
Competent authority In stark contrast to Iraq, the Libyan intervention is explicitly authorized by the UN Security Council under Resolution 1973 and has also
been supported by the Arab League. The coalition governments have, therefore,
competent authority.
Last resort This condition requires that military action be undertaken only if other
options are unlikely to succeed. Qadhafi’s actions had been universally condemned
and an array of sanctions imposed: but none of these measures were deterring
him from his brutal assault on his own people. With his forces poised to attack
Benghazi, coalition operations commenced just in time to prevent the slaughter
that would have occurred. The last resort condition was met.
Proportion The next requirement is that before military action is undertaken a
careful assessment should be made with the aim of ensuring that the harm likely to
arise will not outweigh the good achieved, taking into account the probability of
success. Such assessment is, as noted earlier, difficult because we take moral decisions
in conditions of uncertainty; but it is, nonetheless, crucial to the just war appraisal.
So are there reasonable grounds for supposing that the harm likely to be caused
by coalition operations will not outweigh the good to be achieved? That good,
as specified in the just cause, is the protection of civilians from slaughter. So this
question becomes: are there good grounds for supposing that the military opera32
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The responsibility to protect (Ottawa: Inter­­
national Research Centre, Dec. 2001), p. viii.
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
tion will succeed in preventing civilian slaughter and that fewer civilians will be
killed than would otherwise be the case? Judged against that narrowly prescribed
objective, the answer is, I believe: yes. Just imagine the slaughter that would have
been perpetrated if Qadhafi’s troops had been allowed to fight through the densely
populated city of Benghazi ‘house by house’. This assessment is, however, subject
to regular reassessment as the military action progresses. Just war thinking is not
static but dynamic.
Jus in bello The conduct of operations needs to comply with the principles of
proportion and non-combatant immunity. The operations in the first two weeks
of the war have so far complied with these stipulations, with proportionate force
directed against military targets and considerable efforts made to minimize civilian
casualties. This has included the cancellation of RAF bombing missions because
of the presence of civilians near the targets.
Just peace Will the military operation lead to a just peace? That is a very difficult
question to answer, not least since how events unfold will depend in large measure
on the actions of the Libyan people themselves. It is important to stress that the
objective of the military operation is limited to the protection of civilians. The
objective is thus much more circumscribed than that of the Iraq invasion, where
the coalition leaders, having brought about regime change by the military operation, did thereby assume responsibility for the establishment thereafter of a just
peace. By contrast, the justice of the outcome of the military operation in Libya
will be assessed on the narrower grounds of whether the protection of civilians
is achieved.
It is hoped that affording protection to the Libyan people will give them the
opportunity to choose their own destinies, in the way the Egyptian and Tunisian
peoples are doing, and that this will indeed lead to a just peace and democratic
future for them. But that outcome is very far from assured, as the military action
on the ground ebbs and flows and the inexperience of the rebels becomes only
too apparent. It will also be shaped by many other factors in addition to and
independent of the military intervention, including the economic, humanitarian
and political support that the international community will need to furnish, the
planning for which should now be a high priority.
Conclusion While military operations are still under way, judgements of how
far they comply with just war criteria are inevitably provisional and subject to
reassessment as events unfold. At the time of writing there are, however, grounds
for concluding that the Libyan intervention is just. Crucially, the intervention in
Libya—unlike that in Iraq—is an avowedly humanitarian operation undertaken
to halt a humanitarian catastrophe taking place which only such military action
could stop. Again unlike that in Iraq, the operation also has wide international
support, both regional and international, and is authorized by the UN Security
Council. That support has undoubtedly been strengthened by the limited and
purely humanitarian objectives set, which, learning from the lessons of Iraq, have
wisely excluded western military occupation of an Arab country.
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
So my conclusion is that, while the Iraq invasion was unjust, the Libyan intervention is, so far, just.
The case for the war: Round II, and reflections on Libya
Nigel Biggar
While David Fisher and I differ in our final judgement on the Iraq venture, our
points of agreement are remarkable. We agree that the belief in Iraq’s possession of
WMD, though mistaken, was ‘not unreasonable’; and we agree that ‘in the main,
the reasons for undertaking the war were honourable and concerns over WMD
proliferation genuinely held … [T]hose responsible were trying to make the
world a better and safer place.’ Our agreement is remarkable, because it gainsays
what now passes for common sense.
That said, we disagree on some interesting and important points. First, Fisher
claims that, given ‘the grim logic of war, whereby the suffering caused is certain
while the gains are less certain’, just cause for belligerency requires strong evidence
of the gravity and likelihood of the threat to be countered; and that this was not
forthcoming in the case of Iraq. My initial response is to say that the logic of war
is actually more complicated than that, and that it does not stack the odds against
just belligerency quite as high as Fisher implies. For sure, it is certain that war will
cause suffering, but how much suffering it will cause remains uncertain. And against
this combination of certainty and uncertainty must be posed, in some cases (for
example, that of Libya), the double certainty that not going to war will permit
evils, and that these evils will be grave and atrocious.
Still, I agree that war causes terrible evils and that, therefore, one may not
embark upon it justly for less than very serious reasons. The persistently atrocious
nature of a regime is one such. Some (including, I suspect, Fisher) would object
that this is insufficiently just cause, and that there needs to be a current humanitarian crisis—as in Kosovo in 1998. I do not see why. I can see that a crisis makes
intervention by a western democracy more politically feasible, since dramatic media
reports will generate popular demand for urgent action. But I do not see that it
makes a moral difference. In a national society, if the identity of a serial killer is
known, one does not wait for him to strike again before taking action. So why
in international society should the fact that a Hitler has finished liquidating the
Jews grant him immunity from interference until he decides to turn on the Slavs?
Ordinary life under an atrocious tyrant in a faraway land may seem peaceable
enough to us, but that is only because we are not living in daily terror of being the
next victims on his list. Saddam Hussein’s regime may not have been slaughtering
Kurds or Marsh Arabs in the early 2000s but, according to the UN’s Commission
for Human Rights in 2002, it was nevertheless guilty of ‘systematic, widespread
and extremely grave’ violations of human rights.33 Why is this not sufficient just
cause for military intervention?
33
United Nations Commission on Human Rights, ‘Resolution on Human Rights Abuses in Iraq’, 11 April 2002.
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
It might be argued that advancing a humanitarian case as just cause is entirely
beside the point, since the public reason that Washington and London gave for
invading Iraq was the threat of WMD. But the problem of WMD and the problem
of the atrocious nature of the regime are not separate. WMD were a problem
because it was this regime, with this record, that either had them or was intent on
acquiring them. If Iraq had been Sweden, its possession of WMD would hardly
have been a problem. Moreover, it is not true that the governments’ public cases
for invasion were articulated simply in terms of the threat of WMD. The humanitarian motive was a consistent ingredient in Tony Blair’s advocacy.34
It is quite true that Britain would not have invaded Iraq in 2003 simply for
humanitarian reasons. That does not mean, however, that we would have been
wrong to do so. It merely means that we (as distinct from, say, Israel and the
UN) had no special interest in shouldering this particular just cause. Had Saddam
Hussein been entrenched on the other side of the English Channel, the story would
have been very different. This is where WMD become significant. The clandestine proliferation of WMD, resulting perhaps in Saddam Hussein’s p­ ossession of
them, and leading perhaps to his conveying them to the likes of Al-Qaeda, makes
the atrocious character of the Saddam regime our problem. And it remained our
problem even when it turned out that Iraq lacked the WMD we thought he had,
because he still remained intent on acquiring them.
‘Resulting perhaps … leading perhaps’: yes, the threat was possible, rather than
actual; and classic just war doctrine, rightly wanting to preclude going to war on
whimsical grounds, requires pre-emptive military action to be directed against a
threat that is grave and imminent. To require the threat to be imminent makes sense
with reference to conventional armies massing on borders, where its maturity is
bound to be clear and visible. However, it makes less sense when we are talking
about an atrocious regime or terrorist group coming to possess WMD, especially
nuclear weapons, through the global black market. For the realization of this very
grave threat may well be largely invisible to us. (Yes, we succeeded in tracking
Libya’s efforts to arm itself with WMD, but we failed to track North Korea’s, and
our record on Iran is mixed.) So the question that faces us is this: given the gravity
of the possibility, the imperfection of our intelligence about it, and the proven
malevolence of the parties involved, how much benefit of doubt are we obliged
to extend? What degree of risk are we bound to shoulder? Must we wait until the
threat matures and emerges into the open—by which time the moment for action
may have passed? For sure, it is imprudent—and so immoral—to go to war too
soon. But it is equally imprudent to go to war too late. Therefore I am inclined
to think that the manifest and persistent intent of Saddam Hussein’s atrocious
regime to acquire WMD—despite a decade’s worth of UN resolutions, sanctions
and rising threats—combined with evidence of sustained c­ommunication and
34
See e.g. Mr Blair’s statement to the House of Commons just before the invasion on 18 March 2003 (Tony Blair,
‘Full statement to the House of Commons, 18 March 2003’, in Cushman, ed., A matter of principle, especially
its climax, pp. 338–9).
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David Fisher and Nigel Biggar
cooperation with Al-Qaeda,35 was sufficient to justify military action by those
with an interest in undertaking it.
One of the most important features of David Fisher’s argument to which I
object is his identifying the criterion of proportion as one of the ‘two key tests’
of justice in going to war. Accordingly, he writes that a just war requires that ‘a
careful assessment should be undertaken to seek to ensure that the harm likely to
be caused does not outweigh the good achieved’. My complaint is that this sets the
bar impossibly high. In most spheres of human activity, no one can ‘ensure’ that
the benefits of his or her action will outweigh the costs; and what is impossible
should not be sought. While some consequential consideration is appropriate (for
example, ‘Can we afford to do this, materially and politically?’ ‘Is this course of
action clearly counterproductive?’), we should steer clear of utilitarian delusion,
refusing the pretence of mathematical certainty. The consequences of what we do
ripple right across the world and down the whole length of history, far beyond our
seeing, our controlling and our measuring. We cannot even discern the end-results
of our actions, far less measure the ‘quantities’ of good and evil in them. We could
not discern them in 1939 or in 1940; and how exactly can we now ‘weigh’ the
benefit of destroying the Nazi regime against the costs of 72 million dead and the
expansion of Stalin’s empire of terror? Since consequential reasoning is necessarily
selective and speculative, it is just not possible to mount a strong case in its terms.
The practical upshot of Fisher’s requirement, therefore, is that we will never go
to war until after Srebrenica.
Finally, David Fisher judges that the Iraq war ‘failed fully to meet any of the
just war criteria’. I do not agree. I think that it met ‘just cause’, ‘last resort’ and
‘legitimate authority’. I also think (and I think even he thinks) that it met ‘right
intention’. It did involve elements of culpable disproportion, but their costly
correction demonstrated that the declared intention was sincere and serious. Of
course, my judgements are vulnerable to others’ doubt and dissent; but then, what
judgement is not?
Turning towards Libya (briefly)
First of all, I note how the dispute over the meaning of UN Resolution 1973
confirms my point in Round I about the irreducibly controversial nature of inter35
According to the Butler Report, between October 2002 and February 2003 the Joint Intelligence Committee
( JIC) reckoned that Al-Qaeda agents had been involved in the production of chemical and biological agents
in Kurdish northern Iraq, and that they had been in contact with the Iraqi Directorate General of Intelligence
over four years since 1998, perhaps in search of toxic chemicals (Butler Report, para. 6.2, p. 119). It is true that in
November 2001 the JIC concluded that ‘there is no evidence that these contacts led to practical cooperation:
we judge it unlikely because of mutual mistrust’ (p. 119). This judgement, however, seems too confident, since
common interests can make unlikely allies. No one ever imagined that Hitler and Stalin would overcome their
profound ideological hostility to agree a non-aggression pact, but this they did in 1939; and Shi’a Iran now
supports Sunni groups such as the Taleban and Hamas. The JIC’s own subsequent assessments tend to confirm
this point, noting in October 2002 that ‘Saddam’s attitude to Al Qaida has not always been consistent’, and that
‘Abu Musab al Zarqawi [a senior Al-Qaeda figure] was relatively free to travel within Iraq proper and to stay
in Baghdad for some time’, and in March 2003 that al Zarqawi had established (presumably with the regime’s
permission) sleeper cells in Baghdad for activation during a US occupation of the city (p. 120).
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Was Iraq an unjust war?
national law. Some international lawyers and countries (e.g. Philippe Sands and
Russia) read the resolution restrictively; others (e.g. Malcolm Shaw and Britain)
read it permissively.36 The difference between them is caused not by the text itself,
but by the political and moral views brought to its interpretation.
Those who make the restrictive reading want to make a sharp distinction
between protecting civilians and pursuing regime change. But given the nature
of the regime, and given Qadhafi’s own threats to show no mercy to his enemies,
how exactly are dissident citizens to be kept safe while Qadhafi remains in power?
Critics of the military intervention insist that the Libyan people should be
allowed to forge their own destiny—and that western powers should therefore
desist from interfering. But this is simplistic. What if the people are powerless
to topple a resolutely repressive regime? What if only external intervention will
make it possible for the people to forge a more liberal destiny? Such is the situation
in Libya—as it was in Iraq. It is telling that the relevant peoples themselves are not
burdened by the qualms of fastidious western anti-imperialists: on 22 March 2011
the Guardian, a resolute critic of the Iraq invasion, reported that the Iraqi people
seemed to be ‘broadly supportive’ of (predominantly western) military intervention in Libya, even to bring about regime change.37
Of course, if Libyan regime change is to be successful in the long term, then it
must be substantially the work of Libyans. It is quite right, therefore, that foreign
powers should limit themselves to playing a supportive role. But it is also prudent
that they refrain from defining in advance the limits of what they will do, since
that should depend on how events develop. The ideal—for both Libyans and the
rest of the world—is that the Qadhafi regime falls and is replaced by a law-abiding,
public-spirited regime. So long as that seems possible, foreign powers should stand
ready to help make it so. But if it comes to pass that only an independent constitutional state in Cyrenaica is possible, then foreigners should support that instead.
Rather than fix our endgame now, we should remain nimble.
On the other hand, we do need to remember the limits of our power—material,
political and military. There may come a time when we should admit that we can
do no more, even if the ideal still eludes our grasp, and even if we have failed to get
very near it at all. It was right and admirable that we tried—in spite of inevitable
uncertainty about costs and benefits—to save the Libyan people from Qadhafi’s
merciless repression, and to help them build a better future. Still, there may come
a time when further striving becomes obviously disproportionate and imprudent.
We were obliged to try; we are not obliged to succeed.
36
37
‘Coalition bombing may be in breach of legal limits’, Guardian, 29 March 2011, p. 5.
‘It is the right of the people to protest against tyrants’, Guardian, 22 March 2011, p. 7.
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International Affairs 87: 3, 2011
Copyright © 2011 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2011 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.