Just War?

Archbishop Justin Welby argued that Syrian airstrikes fulfil Just War criteria. I beg to disagree; yet the problem may lie in the ambiguity of the criteria themselves.

Aquinas was in tradition stretching back to Augustine whereby Christians sought to justify war by moral criteria.

Politicians always seek a moral justification for war. This is because a moral justification is stronger than a pragmatic one. Pragmatic justifications include: appeals to our national interest, public opinion and future election prospects. Moral considerations usually appeal to some absolute value of morality – protection of the innocent, questions of justice, prospects of welfare benefits for those directly affected, and evaluation of likely consequences. How does Syria stack up?

1. Just cause. Here we see the appeal to some absolute standard of morality. We could ask whether our understanding of a shared humanity (as in Kant’s system, his means and ends formula) creates an obligation to act as if we were one of those suffering in Isis-held Raqqa. One difficulty here is that those living in Raqqa might not want the ‘liberation’ of bombing, with its risk of further destruction of a precarious infrastructure and of the death of innocent civilians. Their suffering is likely to increase. We’re proposing violence with no evidence we will relieve the ensuing pain.
2. Right intention. Our intention would appear to be honourable – to drive back what Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn I think rightly describes as a ‘fascist force’. However, if our intention is to eliminate fascistic groups from the world, then there are quite a few whom we might line up (think of Robert Mugabe’s totalitarian Marxism in Zimbabwe for example). Is the UK on some kind of campaign to liberate the world of fascism?
3. Prospects of success. Here perhaps we have the biggest flaw. The Government argues that bombing ISIS with the 70,000 free Syrian army fighters supposedly ready to co-operate, we will somehow drive ISIS out of Syria. This seems highly unlikely. The groups are disparate, not unified. The free Syrian army cannot afford to turn round and attack ISIS because it has Assad’s army at its back. Moreover, they are being attacked from the air by our coalition partner Russia. Thus the strategy seems incoherent.
4. Proportional force. It could also be argued that Syrian airstrikes with just 16 UK warplanes is disproportionately small. I estimated that our planes form just 3% of the aircraft currently engaged over Syria. And if you want success, many would argue, you need to put 100,000 fighting troops on the ground. No-one is intending to do this. So is this air attack just tokenism – an assuaging of guilt should we fail to follow the appeal of our ally, France? The airstrikes are disproportional – disproportionately small as a response, it seems to me.

The biggest fear is that airstrikes stir up a larger hornet’s nest of hatred for Britian and its western allies. When the next terror outrage happens both sides of the debate will say, “I told you so”. David Cameron will say ‘ just see how big the threat is, and those opposed to war will say “we provoked ISIS into retaliation”.

My opposition to war is probably based on this consequentialist view: the world became even more unstable after Wednesday’s vote, and I am fearful where it will all end up.