RITE AND REASON: The UN has three grounds which jointly constitute adequate just cause for military action in Iraq, writes Séamus Murphy.
On the eve of the UN-sponsored offensive against Iraq in January 1991, Pope John Paul II told the diplomatic corps that "the needs of humanity require that we proceed resolutely towards outlawing war" and expressed the hope that "the norms of international law will be increasingly and effectively furnished with coercive provisions adequate to ensure their application". Outlawing war is to be achieved not by unilateral disarmament but by increasing the UN's military power to deal with aggressor governments.
"Just war" theory involves the application at international level of the state's duty to protect the innocent against violent criminals and its right to use timely necessary force to do so. Two important conditions are just cause and competent authority.
First, just cause is constituted by unjust attack (actual or threatened), and the affected country's government is the relevant competent authority.
The threat need not be explicit or imminent: it suffices that a reasonable observer would think it obtained.
Second, growing acceptance of human rights as universal moral claims, coupled with media highlighting of genocide, has generated the sense that government-inspired massive violation of human rights (as in Bosnia, Kosovo and Rwanda) constitutes just cause for UN intervention.
The UN has three grounds which jointly constitute adequate just cause for military action against Iraq: (1) By persistent refusal to dispose of his weapons of mass destruction and continuing to manufacture more (as UN inspectors' reports and the evidence of defectors show), Saddam has violated the terms of the 1991 ceasefire. Had such violation been anticipated, the war would have continued until Saddam was overthrown.
Clausewitz would say that Saddam's behaviour suggests that he sees the 1991 war as ongoing. In which case, he has been winning his 12-year war of attrition with the UN. The importance of respect for UN authority necessitates action.
(2) The most important ground is the threat Iraq poses to its neighbours and to the US. The Iraqi dictator's determination to manufacture weapons of mass destruction is also reflected in acceptance of the effect of sanctions on his people and relative neglect of his conventional forces.
Expelling the UN in 1998 gave time to conceal weapons, and the 12,000- page dossier delivered to UN inspectors failed to account for substantial quantities of chemical and biological weapons-material. Taking this with his record, it is simply not believable that he does not intend to use them eventually.
(3) Reason for removing him altogether is constituted by his regime being a dictatorship ruling by terror, far worse than the Milosevic regime in violation of human rights, murder of anybody who even hints at criticism, use of chemical weapons on his own people, and indifference to the effect of sanctions on them. Such a regime has no legitimacy, no moral entitlement to respect. Given the UN's concern about human rights, it has a moral duty to liberate Iraqis from their oppressor.
MILITARY action must come as a "last resort". But an excessively stringent view of that condition leads to failure to recognise when it has arrived, as Secretary-General Kofi Annan acknowledged in his stinging 1999 indictment of UN failure to protect Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1993.
The slaughter of the second World War might have been much less had Britain and France backed Czechoslovakia in 1938. Nor is the last resort condition necessarily violated by a pre-emptive strike.
With Iraq, the last resort has come. In fact, it came in 1991, since refraining from overthrowing Saddam in the hope that he would change has proved mistaken. Diplomacy is useless. Sanctions have not merely been ineffective, they have been turned against the UN, implicating it in causing suffering to civilians and thereby undermining its moral authority.
They are no longer justifiable. Accordingly, the UN must either give up and suffer strategic defeat, or else remove him from power. If it gives in, not merely will it lose moral authority, the Iraqi people's suffering will have been to no purpose. The only way the UN can redeem that suffering is by liberating them.
Turning to the US, it has good reason to anticipate Saddam will attack if opportunity presents. He can't hurt it with conventional weapons, but could with weapons of mass destruction, probably by proxy rather than directly. He has a direct interest in doing so, and has proved his intent to acquire those weapons and lack of scruple in using them.
While militarily insignificant, September 11th was politically and psychologically an enormously successful blow, as Saddam noted in his impressed reaction to September 11th (in contrast to Iran's shocked reaction). The US is vulnerable here: its government would be foolishly weak not to anticipate similar attack, and others would be unreasonable to deny it the right to reassurance.
Without US military power, the UN would never have liberated Kuwait, its inspectors would never have been allowed back last year, and it has no hope of being able to liberate the Iraqi people.
Politically the US needs the UN and its allies. It must remember its lesson from the Vietnam war, that military victories alone will not guarantee strategic victory: it must win the peace, after winning the war. That means (a) building up Iraq afterwards, not losing interest as it appears to be doing in Afghanistan, and (b) tackling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Séamus Murphy is a Jesuit priest and lectures in philosophy