The moral case alone is not enough to justify Syria air strikes

The mood in the House of Commons last week was sombre and portentous, as was appropriate for a debate on issues of life and death. The Prime Minister’s delivery had his trademark fluency but also an additional element of conviction as he outlined a seven point plan that, taken in aggregate, would represent the long promised comprehensive strategy to take on IS. More of the plan later, but David Cameron’s pitch rested as much on moral exhortation as the cold eyed calculus of strategic planning.

His central, and rhetorical, thesis was simple: how can we stand back when others go in harm’s way to defeat an organisation that threatens us all? Quite simply, it is morally indefensible to accept a free ride on the back of military operations—and potentially military sacrifices—made by our friends and allies and we must accept our share of the burden. The House of Commons will deliver its verdict next week, but that outcome may owe more to the bizarre internal contortions of the Labour Party and the insistence of the SNP on having an opinion on everything but responsibility for nothing, than the Prime Minister’s excursion into moral philosophy.

And what about the plan? Conforming to the new orthodoxy of whole government strategic planning, there’s a bit of home and away and nods in the direction of policing, intelligence, diplomacy, stabilisation and development and, of course, military operations. It has the clear fingerprints of the major Whitehall departments, co-ordinated under the guiding hand of the National Security Council staff and stamped with very clear Prime Ministerial authority.

But hang on a minute, wouldn’t we be "protecting the UK at home by maintaining robust counter terrorist capabilities” regardless of whether we intended to bomb IS in Syria or not? Indeed, is not defence of the homeland an inalienable responsibility of government that must be discharged before we ever contemplate adventures abroad?

Moreover, vigorous diplomacy is the day job of permanent members of the UN Security Council and the birthright of the Foreign Office; we do it to habitually to mark out our place in the world as much as to address the specific travails of Syria. And, spending lots of development money to keep refugees in the Middle East is an act of no brainer self-interest if it prevents, or even mitigates, migration of Malthusian proportions in the direction of Europe.

Is there not a whiff of the old Treasury trick of counting money already spent in the presentation of a new policy in all this? And, when we strip away the packaging, what element of the plan is new? It boils down to the military dimension and that’s the basis on which we should test Mr Cameron’s claims of moral rectitude.

The military profession is not always celebrated for its capacity for intellectual reflection. In a business where action speaks louder than abstraction, soldiers are expected to do rather than ponder. Refuting this conventional prejudice can await another time, it is sufficient for now to recognise the one thing soldiers do insist on is intellectual clarity about the moral purposes to which they are put. It is axiomatic that people fight better for a cause they believe in and a whole branch of Christian (and Buddhist, and Muslim) moral philosophy has been devoted to what constitutes a just war.

The Christian tradition can be traced back to St Augustine but is most usually associated with St Thomas Aquinas and 13th century scholasticism. But just war theory is not trapped in medieval theology and the Catholic Church has pronounced on the subject as recently as 1992. Central to the entire debate is the probability of successful outcome. To embark on something as grave as war cannot be based on trivial motives, if it is to survive moral scrutiny. Sufficient military force must be committed to create the prospect of success; military tokenism is therefore morally bankrupt.

So, taken against this background, let’s return to the likely impact of a marginal increase in one dimension of the military element of the overall campaign to defeat IS. It doesn’t take long to conclude that the cloak of moral certainty the Prime Minister has chosen to wear more closely resembles the emperor’s new clothes.

So what? How does point scoring in an obscure and arcane debate inform material decisions in the real world? The answer is, pretty substantially. The just war argument is a paraphrase of the recently expressed views of the chair of the House of Commons Defence Committee, Dr Julian Lewis; it also has echoes in the latest report of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, notwithstanding the chair’s subsequent damascene conversion to the cause of intervention. It formed the core of the Weinberger/Powell doctrine of overwhelming force that guided all US interventions in the 1990s, until subsequently hijacked by the Rumsfeld light touch strategies devised in response to 9/11. The debate is neither obscure nor arcane and it will not go away.

As a convinced interventionist, I want the arguments to stack up and that is far more likely to work around a theme of coalition building than one of shining moral example. In the contemporary world, all countries seek coalitions. They represent a collective solution to the dilemmas faced by nations, like us, that cannot act decisively alone, or nations, like America, unwilling to act decisively alone. Within this context, burden sharing is an entirely legitimate and laudable aim but it should not, as the Prime Minister is in danger of doing, be confused with high moral purpose.