For more than a decade, the question of intervention has been the most important issue in international politics. When if ever is it right to attack a state that has not itself attacked another state? And is the explicit authorisation of the UN security council essential before such an attack can be legitimate? Since the US carved out a safe area for the Kurds in northern Iraq in April 1991, theory and practice have shadowed each other through actions taken and not taken in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan and most recently Iraq again and Sudan.
Armed intervention in such circumstances is controversial – as Robert Skidelsky wrote in last month’s Prospect – because it is seen as a departure from the ground rules of the international system as envisioned in the UN charter. Skidelsky says that
the UN system does not provide an adequate framework for assessing when intervention is appropriate in today’s world, and proposes that we supplement it with guidelines drawn from the venerable tradition of just war theory.
Of course, it is desirable for any country that is about to attack another to ask itself whether recourse to war is truly justified. But when has anyone set out to make the case for an unjust war? All wars fought by modern liberal states (and not only by them) are represented by their advocates as morally justified. Skidelsky makes a plausible case that the Iraq war failed to meet the just war threshold, but there were also some just war theorists on the other side. The neoconservative Catholic Michael Novak was so persuaded that an attack on Iraq was justified that he tried to win over the Pope.
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