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RADIO 4
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ANALYSIS
JUST WARS OR JUST MORE WARS?
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Felipe Fernndez-Armesto
Producer: Simon Coates
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast date:
Repeat date:
CD number:
Duration:

19.08.04
22.08.04
PLN432/04VT1033
27.40

Taking part in order of appearance:

Field Marshal The Lord Bramall of Bushfield, K.G.,

G.C.B., M.C.
Chief of General Staff, 1979-82 & Chief of Defence Staff,
1982-85
General Sir Michael Rose, K.C.B., D.S.O., Q.G.M.
Former Commander of the United Nations Protection
Force in Bosnia & Adjutant-General responsible for
values and ethics within the British Army
Michael Walzer
UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science,
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Pioneer of modern study of just war theory
Oliver ODonovan
Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology &

Canon of Christ Church, Oxford

Vaughan Lowe
Chichele Professor of Public International Law &
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Jean Bethke Elshtain
Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social &
Political Ethics, University of Chicago Divinity School
Sohail H. Hashmi
Associate Professor of International Relations,
Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts
The Lord Hannay of Chiswick, G.C.M.G., C.H.
UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations,
1990-95 &
Member, UN Secretary Generals High Level Panel on
Threats, Challenges and Change
The Rt. Hon. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Q.C.
Former Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for
Defence

FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
When our leaders start wars,
they dont say, These wars will be good for you. Or
cheapen your oil. Or kill off your enemies. They say,
These wars are just. We may question their sincerity but
not their political skill. If they profess to care about the
justice of wars, its a sure sign that their voters and soldiers
do, too. Yet former standards were different, werent they?
More practical, perhaps. Field Marshal Lord Bramall was
Chief of the General Staff during the Falklands War.
BRAMALL:
Up until recently, when
warfare has become considerably more complicated, I
would have thought that people went to war not on the
question of justice; they went to war on purely the question
of self-interest. I mean, the Second World War was initiated
not so much for justice but because the Germans were
doing things we thought were improper and were getting
too big for their boots and had to be stopped. It was
about power, balance of power and hegemony. The
trouble with the word justice is it means quite different
things to different people, and I dont think that people go
round in the barrack room and say, Are we on a just war?
ROSE:
I
that soldiers do
how they perform
actually whether

think it is terribly important

think about these issuesfirst of all, not only
and behave during a conflict, but
the conflict per se is just.

FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
General Sir Michael Rose,
former United Nations Commander in Bosnia and Adjutantgeneral responsible for values and ethics within the British
Army.
ROSE:
I happened to be the
Commandant of the Staff College in the early Nineties and
we started to not do war games there, we started to do

peace games. And we did have people coming to talk to

the students there to try and challenge them with some of
the ideas that they were going to have to cope with when
they went on operations, and I think that was immensely
valuable.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
When you listen to General
Rose after Field Marshal Bramall, you can hear the thinking
of a new generation crashing through long-disused gears.
But if just war thinking can sound unfamiliar, its hardly new.
One of the problems with it is that its very old. In the early
fifth century, St. Augustine said war must respond to
aggression, as a last resort, without covert motives or
innocent deaths. For over a thousand years, the theory
commanded respect, even when it failed to deliver its
goals. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century states
discarded it altogether: they didnt want to be weakened
by tenderness of conscience. Can just war theory adapt to
the novelties of war today? And what difference might it
make? Will we have just wars or will we just have wars?
When you ask the statesmen, soldiers and diplomats who
actually decide on warand the intellectuals who advise
themyou get worryingly unresolved answers. The
disagreements begin when you ask what just war is.
Michael Walzer is Professor of Social Science at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, and a pioneer of the
modern study of just war theory.
WALZER:
A just war isnt just in the
usual sense of the word justice. It means a war that we can
justify; a war that we think is defensible; even perhaps a
war that ought to be fought. In fact, I think justice is under
a cloud as soon as the fighting begins. The theory of just
war is an accommodation to the deep criminality of war as
a human activity. It recognises its necessity; it tries to set
limits on its conduct. It doesnt make it just in the usual
sense of the word.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Justice in a special sense.
Does Oliver ODonovan, Regius Professor of Moral and
Pastoral Theology at Oxford, agree with that?
ODONOVAN:
It is a special sense, but it is a
clearly analogous sense. Somebody is guilty ifand only
ifthey are actively engaged in doing real harm and real
wrong. The Christian conception of war, I think, of the just
war, was based very much on this analogy, and that the
tests were recognisably about justice.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:

So what are those tests?

ODONOVAN:
Its a use of force against
and to punish and in response to an activity of military
wrong of some kind. And, second, that its constrained by
the conditions of doing justice on Earth, which is that you
can get some real foundation for peaceful, just, ordered
co-existence out of it.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
For Michael Walzer, just war
theory is about making injustice a little less unjust. For Oliver
ODonovan its about righting wrong, achieving peace.

One thing they agree about is that its there to guide

conscience. Why is that necessary?
ODONOVAN:
That is because we have a
history thats been shaped by the moral preoccupations of
Christianity and those moral preoccupations have included
deep, conscientious concerns about whether its right to
go to warconscientious concerns that sometimes rest
with the princes, the policy-makers, the powers that dispose
of armies and sometimes rest with the people who have to
fight in them.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
It sounds a bit as if the
function of just war theory, then, is to make war easier
rather than to make peace more prevalent because its
function is to dissolve the conscientious scruples that
people have about war.
ODONOVAN:
It sometimes operates that
way and it sometimes reinforces them. As with all moral
theories, its aim is to bring you to the point when you can
make a discrimination and you can ask about this case.
There are wrong scruples, but there are equally good
scruples, and there are moments at which you have to say,
No, I cant go down that route.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Without just war theory,
conscience is a hostage to tyrants. Nowadays, we surely
have an alternative: international law. But that depends
on just war theory, doesnt it? Vaughan Lowe, Chichele
Professor of Public International Law and Fellow of All Souls.
LOWE:
It has emerged from that,
theres not the slightest doubt, and if you go back to the
early texts on international law, in the fifteenth and
sixteenth century, that is exactly what they are about. They
are concerned with the treatment of ambassadors and just
wars and the rightness of the conduct of war. The
principles in the UN Charter and everything else are all that
is necessary for the legal system to operate. But the people
who use the system, the states that make the system of
international law, are obviously going to be guided by
political and moral thoughts, and they mould international
law in order to serve the political and moral objectives
which they think are right.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
In practice, we have heard
political leaders and government spokesmen use the
rhetoric of just war and particularly use the phrase just
cause. Why do they do that?
LOWE:
I think the general
population is quite rightly concerned not simply with the
question whether its lawful or not, but whether its right.
And its certainly not the case that every lawful action is
morally defensible. And I think thats what theyre trying to
get at when they talk about just war. Theyre saying more
than that its technically lawful. Theyre saying its a good
idea. And I think that people think that answering the legal
question excuses them from answering the moral question
and that they think its enough to concentrate on that.
And I absolutely agreethe ultimately critical issue is the

moral one: is it justified to use force or not?

FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Vaughan
professorship at Oxford is named after
who, in Shakespeares Henry V, drew up
justifying the kings campaign against
dodgy dossier.

Lowes
Archbishop Chichele
the documents
Francethe original

It seems that in todays world, as in medival times, we

cant do without a theory of just war. But the just war
theory weve inherited grew out of peculiarly Christian
thinking, whereas ours is a culturally plural world. Consensus
depends on finding values that mutually wary civilisations
can share.
Jean Bethke Elshtain, author of Just War against Terror,
teaches ethics at the University of Chicago. Hers is one of
the most respected academic voices in defence of the
justice of Americas present wars. Does she think just war
theory is essentially Christian?
ELSHTAIN:
The just war tradition
historically emerged as an obligation of Christian caritas or
neighbour love and included the use of force in order to
spare the innocent. So it seems to me that theres a way in
which this obligation of caritas is now talked about as a
duty to protect or attempt to preserve life that has been
wantonly destroyed.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
But isnt there also an Islamic
tradition of just war which one could appeal to equally well
perhaps?
ELSHTAIN:
Certainly in its inception
within the Islamic tradition, the notion of a war to extend
the boundaries of Islam was, in fact, a righteous or a
justifiable thing to do. Now, I know that historically in the
Islamic tradition various schools of legal thought worked to
modify that, but that is an issue of course thats of some
exigent concern for us because of the way in which Islamist
radicals have picked up on aspects of that earlier tradition
and are arguing, I think quite illegitimately, that they are
representing the true voice of Islam on these matters.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
The potential for conflict is
clearly there. Thats why we need a just war theory that
transcends cultural boundaries. Especially, we need one
on which Muslims and Christians can unite. So how do we
deal with the historic differences Jean Bethke Elshtain
points out? Sohail Hashmi, a professor of international
relations at Mount Holyoke College, specialises in the study
of the Islamic ethics of war.
HASHMI:
When were talking about
jihad as an expansionist war, this is not something that is
unambiguously embraced by the basic sources of Islamic
ethicsthe Koran and the hdith of the Prophet. The world
has changed dramatically, and thats why this idea of
expansionist jihad or expansionist war is so problematic to
modern Muslimsthe vast majority of whom, I would say,
have at this point rejected the idea that jihad can properly
be interpreted as a war to expand the hold of Islamic law.

FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Although in Islam and the
West just war theory developed from different startingpoints, the traditions converge. Thats thanks to the
pressures of history and values of natural law and classical
philosophy which are part of the common heritage of Islam
and the West. We have to face the fact, though, that
there are important constituencies outside the consensus.
For some Muslims, jihad is more than just, its holy. And
Christianity doesnt have a concept of holy war, does it?
Oliver ODonovan.
ODONOVAN:
Can war be holy? No or
maybe I should say, yes! [laughter] That is, the holy war is a
paradigm within the Old Testament, and one of the points
at which the Christian self-definition distinguishes itself
because the role of Israel in the history of Gods dealings
with humanity is, as it were, completenot irrelevant but
completed.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
biblical Israel?

Were talking about the

ODONOVAN:
The biblical Israel. Yes, thats
right. And then holy war becomes an anachronism to think
of. So the Christian answer is, I suppose, yes there could be
a holy war and no there cant be holy war.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
So from the perspective of
Christian theology you cant have genuine Christian holy
wars, but you could have them in the biblical Israel. And
you can have them in Islam. This is important because if
you think your war is holy, you can ignore just war
constraints. Innocence vanishes. No one is a noncombatant. On the other side, there are only enemies.
Can Sohail Hashmi, who is a Muslim, reconcile Islamic and
Western traditions on this point?
HASHMI:
I make the distinction
between holy war and jihad because no matter how
exalted the ends, the means must always be restricted. So
jihad can never be a war of unlimited ends or unlimited
means.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
I suppose I understand holy
war to mean a war which confers spiritual rewards on those
who take part in it, its actually a meritorious act which
helps you get to heaven. Is that how a Muslim would
ordinarily understand jihad?
HASHMI:
Well, certainly many Muslims
would. But if a fighter, a Muslim mujahed, one who is
waging jihad, goes to war for perfectly sound and
legitimate reasons and yet pursues his jihad in illegitimate
waysfor example, by killing innocent peoplethen that
fighter can no longer be considered a mujahed, he cannot
be considered as waging jihad.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
There is a significant overlap,
then, in mainstream Western and Islamic thinking. Even so,
having common principles of just war doesnt mean we
can agree about whether particular wars conform to those

principles. We havent got an agreed arbiter. What we

have got are the United Nations and the United States. The
first has legal standing, the second real power. Does Jean
Bethke Elshtain, the professor of ethics, think either has
enough moral authority to pronounce on whether wars are
just?
ELSHTAIN:
As far as the United Nations
and its status is concerned, alas its track record in this
regard is not particularly good. That may, in fact, place an
even larger burden on some of its member states who are
themselves committed to the very rights that are being
systematically violated somewhere in the world to perhaps
assume some special responsibility in order to prevent
egregious systematic and continuing abuses.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Well, this could be a
Jesuitical strategy to persuade us that you could equally
well dispense with a doctrine of just war and defend
American policy on grounds of realism.
ELSHTAIN:
If we simply advance the
notion that considerations of realpolitik, of military necessity
must dominate, that thats the only honest and credible
way to do it and we should have done with all this
nonsense about ethics and justice and human rightsthen
what one will get, rather than just war or an attempt at
advancing justice through use of force, you will just have
war.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
That warning is salutary. To
heed it, we need a just-war doctrine that addresses threats
to peace St. Augustine never thought of. The multiplying
terror; the proliferating weapons; the ever-more exigent
humanitarian horrorsall these might seem to demand
pre-emption. But no right to launch pre-emptive war exists
in traditional theorywhich means its hard to
accommodate in international law. Lord Hannay was
British Ambassador to the United Nations during the first Gulf
War, and now serves on Kofi Annans High Level Panel on
Threats, Challenges and Change.
HANNAY:
This is a very difficult one,
but I do start from the point of analysis that the world has
changed as a result of the willingness of terrorists to use
suicide bombing methodsi.e. methods which make
deterrents completely pointless or inoperableand also
the risk, though it hasnt yet gone further than that except
in the case of the sect in Japan, that they will get their
hands on some chemical, biological or nuclear or
radiological weapon and deploy it against innocent
civilians. This is a measurable risk. Now does it change all
the rules? I dont think it changes all the rules, but I think it
does make you look rather carefully at some of the rules.
Then it leads you on, of course, then to the issue of preemption. If you look at the United Nations Charter, drawn
up in 1945, its perfectly clear that the founding fathers
envisaged the possibility of pre-emption because they talk
about action to deal with a threat to international peace
and security. Well, thats pre-emption in my understanding
of the English language.

RIFKIND:
It seems to me that both for
reasons of practicality and reasons of principle, a doctrine
of pre-emption should not exist.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, former
Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for Defence.
RIFKIND:
Firstly, if we are to see as a
new principle of international law that pre-emptive action is
justified, then that cannot just be a right that applies to the
United States. It must be a right which is available to every
single international state, and therefore it would become a
very unstable world with individual countries having the
right to determine when they believe the doctrine of preemption ought to be invoked. The second point about a
doctrine of pre-emption, which is equally important, is that
if there are exceptional circumstances when a country
believes that it is so likely to be attacked or have its rights
severely damaged by another state as to justify preemptive action, then the evidence on which it takes such a
decision must be so clear, so unmistakeable, that that
information can be made available to the wider
international community to explain why you took such
action in the first place. Now that is the significance of the
controversy about WMD: the failure to find them and the
manifest failings in the intelligence that has now become
clear demonstrates the danger of having such a doctrine
in the first place.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Between them, Malcolm
Rifkind and David Hannay have comparable experience,
congruent qualifications and unanswerable authority; but
they cant agree on the case for pre-emption. The
debates echoed in real controversies over policy and
grand strategy in Washington. Can Vaughan Lowe, our
international lawyer, arbitrate?
LOWE:
It is an interesting question
because the United States National Security Strategy in
2002 did suggest that the United States would take preemptive action even before threats were imminent. But I
think that a more elastic right of self-defence meets the
need that is addressed by the claim to pre-emptive force in
the American strategy.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Although isnt pre-emption
an illogical doctrine anyway because if you have one side
that has the right to launch a pre-emptive war, then that in
itself becomes a threat to the other side who then have a
right of pre-emption of their own?
LOWE:
Well, absolutely right! It
always troubled me, as I watched the B52s flying over my
house, that the British government hadnt explained that
those B52s were legitimate military targets which could be
brought down over Oxford by the Iraqi military if they chose
to do so!
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
So far nothing in just war
theory seems able to deliver the justice we demand. But
one theme thats always been there, and has always
commanded wide assent is the doctrine of last resort: the

obligation to use war only when other remedies fail.

This is,
in a sense, the opposite of pre-emption. If pre-emption is
frayed, could last resort be a strong enough strand to cling
to? Lord Hannay recalls just how much of a part it played
in the decision to launch the First Gulf War.
HANNAY:
We did address the last
resort argument in 1990 and 91. I remember quite clearly,
because the main opposition to going to war at the time
we went to war then was a school of thoughtstrangely
enough, I suspect most of them would not stick to it now
who said, We must give sanctions longer to work. And
we pointed out why it was that the time scale in which
sanctions were likely to work was too long to enable
there to be something worth saving by the end of it. There
wouldnt have been any Kuwaitis or any Kuwait there to
save by the time it was over because of the demographic
activities of the Iraqis and all the other viciousness which
they were unleashing.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Last resort licences delay
and costs lives. When the world faces massacressuch as
those in Rwanda in 1994the doctrine of last resort can be
more of a hindrance to justice than a help. The
philosopher, Michael Walzer.
WALZER:
Last resort is a metaphysical
term. You never reach lastness, theres always something
you could do. If there is a massacre going on in Rwanda,
the crucial thing is to stop it. As we saw, there were lots of
things to door to pretend to doin the face of the
Rwandan massacre, but the use of force was, I think, the
just response; and just because if we were interested in
stopping the murders, there was no alternative.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
And just to make this clear in
a concrete case; in the case of the Iraq War you do think
thats an instance of a war initiated before wed got to the
point where we could reasonably say it was unavoidable?
WALZER:
Right. We were successfully
containing Saddams regime. We now know how
successfully!
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
We need the doctrine of last
resort when we face a situation like that of Iraq. And we
need to be able to shelve it to save lives from slaughter.
Just war theory is riven with contradictions. Even the
principle at stake in humanitarian emergencies, like that in
Kosovo in the late 1990s, is fraught with problems. Sir
Malcolm Rifkind.
RIFKIND:
What Mr. Blair and people
like him have added to this debate is the argument that
somehow there is a moral obligation to intervene to
prevent injustice and that sometimes legitimises a war that
would not otherwise be contemplated. And that, I think,
opens up a whole new dimension where I for one am very
uncomfortable with the claims that are being made by
some of the protagonists.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:

Why are you uncomfortable

with that because surely its consistent with what most

people would say is a basic principle of justice, which is the
defence of the weak against oppression by the strong to
intervene?
RIFKIND:
If one could always be
satisfied that these were indeed objective criteria
objectively being applied, then there might be a case that
could be made. If you create a war by your own
discretion, then you sometimes create more problems for
the people youre trying to help or the issue youre trying to
resolve than if that war had never taken place. For
example, in the case of Kosovo the ethnic cleansing that
was supposed to be what the argument was all about,
most of that ethnic cleansing happened after the war had
begun.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
To do nothing might be an
even greater injustice. Malcolm Rifkinds logic would leave
everyone to get on with their own massacres. But he does
have a point. Every time we intervene to save the victims
of one massacre, we commit an injustice against others we
ignore. All too often, redemption from massacre is a
pretext rather than a project. Where it did apply, in
Rwanda, the world failed to act; where it didnt apply, in
the Iraq of 2003, Britain and America invaded. Five
hundred years ago, monarchs delayed or halted wars
while theologians pronounced on their justice. Now we do
much the same, deferring action in Darfur while our sages
debate.
Whether or not you intervene for humanitarian reasons, you
cant avoid problems caused by your own forces once
conflict is joined. Michael Roses job in the British Army, and
as Commander of the United Nations Protection Force in
Bosnia, was to sort out the moral muddle.
ROSE:
If you stray across a
particular line, you would have been better not going to
war in the first place if youre going to start carrying out
inhuman acts and behave in an uncivilised way yourself.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
In the Kosovo conflict, I had
the impression that a lot of quite innocent Serbs who had
nothing to do with the conflict were being tyrannised by
the bombing of Serbia.
ROSE:
They most certainly were,
and I think in a way the NATO forces ran out of what I call
legitimate military targets and started to go for ones which
were less easy to justify. The moral issues that are more
difficult to define, I think, are in peacekeeping and postconflict situations where youre supposed to be standing on
high moral ground, youre supposed to be making the
world a better place and making other peoples lives
better, but often youre being forced, through outside
pressure or from your own reactions, to do things which are
not helpful to your ultimate goals.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
Failures in the conduct of
war vitiate the justice of the noblest cause. Unjust peacekeeping can undo just war. But even if we could avoid

those failures, wed still have to solve the problem of

justifying intervention in some humanitarian emergencies
and not others. Michael Walzer has devoted thirty years to
thinking about this. Whats his solution?
WALZER:
The crucial just cause of
intervention has to be this is a phrase from the law books
of the nineteenth century crimes that shock the
conscience of humankind.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
that?

But how do you calibrate

WALZER:
You mean, how many
murders make a massacre? I dont know.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
How can we find
formulations of just war theory which are proof against
these deficiencies?
WALZER:
There is no such thing. The
same thing is true for all theories of politics and morality.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
But in that case, if we had a
just war theory, it wouldnt bring us peace.
WALZER:
No. It might persuade some
people to limit the occasions on which they fight and to
limit the means they use once they are fighting. Thats the
goal of the theory.
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
As far as we can tell, wars
are as frequent and evil as ever. The just war theory weve
got doesnt work. Politicians can abuse it, discarding
justifications like playing-cards, claiming the outcome
makes everything all right. Field Marshal Lord Bramall has
heard them do it.
BRAMALL:
Justice is an accolade you
only win as a result of what youve done being successful,
the end justifying the means, your conduct being all right,
as best it could be. And when all those things click into
place, you then preen yourself and say, Well, that was a
just war if ever there was one!
FERNNDEZ-ARMESTO:
What can we do? We
might revert to realpolitik, and perpetuate its dangers and
depravities. Or we might shelve justice and admit that we
fight wars because we have to, not because we ought to.
The terrorists would be happy with that: necessity hath no
law; it bites through moral reins.
Or we might try revising the theory. Idealistically-inspired
improvements can make things worse. Maybe just war
theory has been so unsatisfactory, for so long, precisely
because it cant be improved. But it seems too
preoccupied with traditions and texts, instead of satisfying
the passions of justicehunger for equality, thirst for
retribution. Justice is tough. It may carry a cost: more wars
rather than fewer, while we cowe the tyrants and
aggressors. But now that just war is back in political
discourse, we should be clamouring to get justice back,

too.
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