Our rulers rely more on impulse than reason when they take us into war

A new book provides a check list for leaders considering military action, but the rest of us must make them heed it

Max Hastings
Monday October 15, 2007

Nations in general, and Britain in particular, go to war with astonishing insouciance. Since the consequences are so grave, it might be thought that decisions to fight would be subject to rigorous scrutiny and analysis before the tanks roll. Not so. Anthony Eden lunged towards Suez in 1956. Margaret Thatcher dispatched a task force to the Falklands in 1982 on the basis of a visceral political calculation, not a hard-headed military one. Tony Blair all but gave George Bush a blank cheque for support of US military action, first in Afghanistan, then in Iraq.

Gordon Brown has assured the House of Commons that in future it will all be different. Parliament will be fully consulted in advance. We should hope he means this, if Bush attempts a last reckless stab at Iran before quitting the White House.

Meanwhile, the prime minister would do well to spend half an hour with Just War, a new book by Lord Charles Guthrie and Sir Michael Quinlan (no more time is needed, for it is very short). The authors - respectively Britain's best modern chief of defence staff and the cleverest defence civil servant of recent times - seek to provide a check list for national leaders contemplating military action.

Its headings are readily rehearsed: Just Cause; Proportionate Cause; Right Intention; Right Authority; Reasonable Prospect of Success; Last Resort. Lest these should seem obvious, most people would agree that the 2003 invasion of Iraq failed to meet at least five and possibly all six criteria. Tony Blair could assert that, as a prime minister acting with the assent of parliament, he possessed constitutional authority. But there is still fierce debate about whether the attorney general's advice on the war's legality was either honest or proper.

Guthrie and Quinlan do not oppose military interventions in principle. Indeed, it is because of the inevitability that western troops will find themselves fighting somewhere new before long, perhaps in a much better cause than Iraq, that the book is so relevant. Both men are practising Christians. They write in the context of the moral concept of just war, something quite different from holy war: "The tradition recognises that, while war can never be positively good, it is not always the worst thing."

An early use of force can sometimes pre-empt terrible events. They cite the example of the former Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s, where swifter western action (though I must confess to having been one of those who opposed this) might have saved thousands of lives. They point to Rwanda and Darfur as examples where western intervention should have taken place, and did not.

Yet it is not enough to identify causes that justify the use of force: "We must not take action in which the incidental harm done is an unreasonably heavy price to incur for the likely military benefit." The authors identify the 1991 recapture of Kuwait and the 1999 bombing of Kosovo as cases in which the infliction of injury and death were justified. Slobodan Milosevic's Serbian and Saddam Hussein's Iraqi conscripts were, arguably, as much victims of the two dictators as the Kosovans and Kuwaitis. But the dictators' soldiers represented obstacles to just outcomes that had to be overcome.

Guthrie and Quinlan perceive a dilemma, in assessing how far it is legitimate to destroy national infrastructure on which a host of innocents, as well as a regime, depends. Here again, proportionality is all. The deaths of civilians must never form a central objective of a war plan, even in retaliation for attacks on one's own people.

Every modern experience of military intervention shows that there is a duty of jus post bellum, at least as important as jus bellum. The gravest shortcoming of western policy, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or even Sierra Leone, has been failure to match military commitment with convincing civil follow-up. Until this issue is addressed, soldiers will never be successful in succouring stricken societies.

Implicit in Guthrie and Quinlan's essay is awareness that Iraq has been a catastrophe for western foreign policy, as well as for the Iraqi people. "It is surely very desirable," they say with studied understatement, "that decisions by governments to use armed force externally ... should be taken only on the basis of thorough and accurate information made publicly available, candid and consistent explanation by government, and careful consideration fully involving parliaments in advice and decision." Force must remain a last resort - but there was no case, they say, for delaying the 1991 assault on Saddam's army in Kuwait, because the occupation was inflicting harm every day that it continued. It was unrealistic to keep the coalition forces in Saudi Arabia at readiness indefinitely.

They are sceptical about the realistic prospect of gaining the support of the UN security council for each and every intervention, because Russia and China often exercise vetoes for their own political reasons, even when an overwhelming moral case exists. The west could not have gained UN support for its 1950 action in Korea, save for the accident of a Soviet boycott of the security council for unrelated reasons. If the possibility of intervention in Burma was ever raised, China would certainly block it.

In 2003, however, it was almost impossible to argue that every alternative means of dealing with Saddam had been exhausted before Iraq was invaded. In measuring the relative threats that Iraqi WMD might one day be used on the US homeland against the consequences of war for Iraqis, "the likelihood that the invasion and its aftermath would lead to tens of thousands of deaths was always far greater".

Quinlan opposed the 2003 invasion. Guthrie, however, is here indulging in some soul-searching. At the time he backed intervention. On the basis of what the US and British governments told us, he believed that Saddam would prove to possess WMD. Now, he perceives painful lessons to be learned about both intelligence and political process.

In assessing circumstances in which nations are justified in going to war, the book omits one important issue: why they do not. Rwanda and Darfur are case studies. The west did not send troops, chiefly because the US and its allies perceived many hazards and no self-interest. In this cynical world, it is almost impossible to mobilise political or public support for the use of force merely for altruistic purposes. Africa is frequently the scene of ghastly crimes against humanity. Western troops rarely engage there, however, not only because of the colonial legacy, but also because we have no objectives of our own to advance or protect. Common humanity, alas, is not enough.

It would be nice to suppose that our leaders would regard Guthrie and Quinlan's work as a crisis primer. In truth, however, presidents and prime ministers will continue to promote military actions on impulses driven by events. It is the rest of us who should exploit this book, to help decide whether armed initiatives by our governments deserve our support. Where they do not, we must learn to act more effectively to stop them than did Congress, parliament and the American and British peoples in 2003.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2191325,00.html