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Journal of Military Ethics

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Humanitarian Intervention after

Iraq: Just War and International Law
Perspectives
a
James Turner Johnson
a
Department of Religion , Rutgers University , New Brunswick,
NJ, USA
Published online: 19 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: James Turner Johnson (2006) Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq:
Just War and International Law Perspectives, Journal of Military Ethics, 5:2, 114-127, DOI:
10.1080/15027570600707706

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 Journal of Military Ethics,
Vol. 5, No. 2, 114
127, 2006
/

Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq:

Just War and International Law
Perspectives
JAMES TURNER JOHNSON
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Department of Religion, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

ABSTRACT During the 1990s, particularly with reference to the context of the conflicts in
Somalia, former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, considerable sentiment favoring humanitarian
intervention grew both in just war argument and in discussion of international law. This paper
examines the arguments put forward in these two frames and their implications for international
behaviour and law. But in 2002
/2003, when US President Bush identified the egregious abuses of
human rights perpetrated by Saddam Hussein and his regime over a long history as one of the
reasons for using military force to oust that regime, this humanitarian intervention argument fell
flat. Does this put in question the future of the idea of humanitarian intervention after the Iraq
war of 2003? This paper argues that the experience of humanitarian intervention (or non-
intervention) and its results during the 1990s must be taken together with the case of Iraq in
thinking about the future of humanitarian intervention, and that this future may best be imagined
not in terms of new developments in international law and international order but as a
continuation of past practice.

KEY WORDS: Just war, international law, humanitarian intervention, Iraq

Identifying the Problem

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 12 September 2002
(Bush 2002), United States President George W. Bush laid out three
arguments for the justification of using armed force against the Saddam
Hussein regime in Iraq: to preempt the likely use of weapons of mass
destruction that regime either possessed or was actively seeking; to punish the
Iraqi dictator for his repeated flouting of a number of UN Security Council
resolutions dating to Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait in 1990, the military
action to restore Kuwait, and the cease-fire that ended that military action;
and to halt and punish the Hussein regime’s numerous and egregious
violations of basic human rights of both Iraqis and citizens of neighboring
states. The content and shape of this last argument mirrored those of
arguments advanced with considerable frequency and vigor during the 1990s,

Corresponding Address: James Turner Johnson, Department of Religion, Rutgers University, 70 Lipman
Drive, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-8525, USA. Tel: /1 732 932 9637; Fax: /1 732 932 1271; E-mail:
[email protected]

1502-7570 Print/1502-7589 Online/06/020114
/14 # 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/15027570600707706
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 115

when the focal contexts were the conflicts in Somalia, former Yugoslavia, and
Rwanda. By the end of this decade it seemed as if both ethical analysis and
international law were moving, or had perhaps already moved, toward
defining an obligation of humanitarian intervention, more specifically, an
obligation to intervene across national borders to respond to serious
violations of basic human rights when the government of the society in
question was unable to do so or possibly was itself the perpetrator of the
violations. The arguments for humanitarian intervention which had devel-
oped such force only a few years earlier in the contexts of the Bosnian war,
the Rwandan genocide, and the effort to protect the ethnic Albanian
population of Kosovo simply fell flat, however, in the context of the debate
over whether to use force to oust Saddam Hussein and his regime, though the
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abuses of basic human rights perpetrated by this regime were substantive,

cruel, approaching genocidal, well attested, and had a long and continuing
history.
In the public debate after the Bush speech to the General Assembly (as in
the debate of the present day) most attention focused on the first of the
arguments he offered there: whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction (conceded to be true by virtually everyone at the time) and
whether it intended to use them against the United States or any other nation,
as it had employed chemical weapons during the Iran
Iraq war and against
/

elements of the Iraqi Kurdish population. As to the second argument

President Bush offered, that concerning Iraq’s violations of international law,
while the Administration developed a formal legal position regarding the
violations of UNSC resolutions and the 1991 cease-fire, and while this matter
was debated for a time among international lawyers, this legal argument was
largely ignored in the broader public debate. (I closely followed the reports on
this debate in the New York Times and recall only one story, on an inside
page, on the legal issues.) As for the argument for the need to halt and punish
the Iraqi regime’s egregious violations of basic human rights
the argument
/

for humanitarian intervention by military force
though applauded and

/

seconded by some ‘liberal hawks’ (including myself) and made even more
forcefully and at length by such columnists as Tom Friedman and Bill Keller
in the New York Times, it was completely ignored by others who might have
been expected to resonate positively to it, including those in the American
religious community and many in the international policy community who
had found themselves strongly supporting use of military force for
humanitarian intervention during the decade of the 1990s. In the broader
public debate of 2002
2003, as well as in statements from Administration
/

spokesmen, the humanitarian intervention argument effectively disappeared

from sight altogether, though President Bush reiterated all three of these
arguments two other times: in his January State of the Union speech to the
US Congress and in his brief address announcing the beginning of Operation
Iraqi Freedom, the military operation aimed at overthrowing Saddam
Hussein and his regime. What was true of the United States also applied to
the debates in other countries, including Europe and the Arab states of the
Middle East. For critics of the Bush Administration and the US decision to
 116 J. T. Johnson

use armed force to oust the Iraqi regime, any claim of humanitarian purpose
was never to be taken seriously; it was mere window-dressing for the real aims
defined by power politics.
The question which comes out of this history is whether the case of the war
against Saddam Hussein has removed entirely the possibility of taking
seriously any argument for humanitarian intervention in other possible cases
that may arise. I fear that it has, though this is not the only factor that has
contributed to the striking turnaround in the fortunes of the argument for
humanitarian intervention since its heyday in the 1990s. There are funda-
mental arguments both for and against use of force for such purposes, both in
the just war tradition and in international law. But, as I suggest below, the
experience of humanitarian intervention itself presents lessons that are mixed
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at best and seriously cautionary at worst. Further, both moral and legal
reasoning on this issue take place within a context in which use of military
force for humanitarian intervention is strongly opposed by political realists
and military professionals.
This article examines the question of humanitarian intervention within the
frames of the just war tradition and international law, treating the political
and military issues only as they arise in connection with these two frames. As
to the former, I will develop what I take to be the relevant issues in the just
war tradition and will also specifically look at the use of just war reasoning in
the American just war debate relating to humanitarian intervention. As to
international law, I will focus on the emergence of what has been called ‘the
responsibility to protect’, rooted in two developments: the rise of human
rights law and the recognition of problems in the territorial concept of
sovereignty rooted in the Peace of Westphalia and embodied in the UN
system of international order. The concluding section focuses on the
prospects for humanitarian intervention in the near future.

The Just War Argument

Contemporary just war reasoning takes a number of forms, some of which are
in serious tension with others.
The classic traditional idea of just war, which came together in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries and retained the same form up through theorists of
the era of the Reformation, included a jus ad bellum requiring the authority of
a sovereign ruler, a just cause (described as defence of the common good
against internal and external threats, recovery of persons or property wrongly
taken, and punishment of evildoing), and right intention (defined negatively
as avoiding evil motivations and positively as aiming to create or restore
peace), and a jus in bello which was substantially defined by a growing list of
classes of persons who normally were not involved in war and who, with their
property, should not be attacked in war (Johnson 1999: 44
51). For a time in
/

the eleventh and twelfth centuries various weapons bans also contributed to
defining the in bello limits, and while these have a legacy in modern efforts to
limit the weapons of war, they were a minimal factor in the late medieval/early
modern conception of just war. This classic conception of just war was the
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 117

product of influences from a broad variety of religious and secular sources,

including canon law, theology, the rediscovered Roman idea of jus gentium,
the chivalric code, and contemporary practices of government and war
(Johnson 1975: Chapter 1). The various requirements for just war identified
in classic just war reasoning are deontological in nature; that is, they impose
duties or obligations on those persons charged with the decision to use armed
force
namely, those in sovereign authority
and on those who exercise such
/ /

force, namely, those in combatant capacities. While prudential reasoning is

required in carrying out these obligations, this conception of just war has
little in common with contemporary theories identified below that rely
heavily or exclusively on consequentialist reasoning. I have argued strenuously
for the importance of this classic conception of just war as an essential
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reference point for contemporary just war reflection and decision. However,
there are other factors also in the contemporary mix.
One is the influential theory of theologian Paul Ramsey, who conceived the
idea of just war in terms of the Christian obligation of love of neighbor and
emphasized the jus in bello defined in terms of two moral principles,
discrimination and proportionality (Ramsey 1961, 1968). Ramsey said little
about the war-decision itself, regarding this as a matter belonging to the
purview of those involved in government, not a matter for a moralist to
determine.
Another influential conception of just war, the most important one from
the American churches, was first stated in the United States Catholic bishops’
1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace (National Conference of Catholic
Bishops 1983). The Catholic bishops reiterated this understanding of just war
with minor changes in a 1993 statement (National Conference of Catholic
Bishops 1993), and their spokesmen have used it in various connections,
including the 1991 and 2003 uses of force against Iraq (Johnson & Weigel
1991: Part III; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 2003).
Compared with the classic conception of just war, the Catholic bishops’
version differs in several ways, some major and some less substantive. Most
important is their recasting the just war idea as having a common base with
pacifism: a ‘presumption against war’, with the various just war criteria
functioning only to determine when this general ‘presumption’ could be
overturned in any specific case. This turned the classical understanding of just
war on its head: the classical conception, focused on the sovereign’s
responsibility to secure the common good, treated the resort to force as
good or evil depending on who initiated it, the justifying cause, and the
intentionality behind it; yet on the US Catholic bishops’ conception the use
of force itself is an evil to be avoided or restrained, and it is a permissible tool
of statecraft only in exceptional cases. The Catholic bishops’ conception also
introduced several consequentialist criteria
last resort, proportionality, and
/

probability of success
into the jus ad bellum, and subsequently they have
/

used these to strengthen the ‘presumption against war’ in specific cases,

including their entries into the debates of 1990
1991 and 2002
2003 over
/ /

using military force against Iraq. Yet in their 1993 statement, The Harvest of
Justice Is Sown in Peace, the bishops identified a general sort of exceptional
 118 J. T. Johnson

case in which use of armed force may be obligatory: that of humanitarian

intervention. I will discuss this further below.
Michael Walzer’s 1977 book, Just and Unjust Wars, provided still another
conception of just war, one which is based on Walzer’s own building up of the
‘theory of aggression’ and ‘the war convention’ (his terms for the moral issues
dealing with the resort to war and conduct in war, respectively) by means of
illustrative historical cases. An intentionally secular version of just war,
Walzer’s reconstructed just war theory is widely known and used, especially
among military professionals and philosophers.
Finally, there are various exclusively consequentialist versions of just war
reasoning that have been put forward by utilitarian philosophers. These tend
to stress the requirements of last resort, reasonable hope of success, and
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overall proportionality as restraints on the decision to resort to armed force

and the requirement of proportionality in the use of such force.
All the forms of just war reasoning sketched above may be read to provide
justifications for use of armed force in humanitarian intervention, though
individually and as a group they also define restraints on the use of force in
such cases. Prominent in the debates over humanitarian intervention during
the 1990s were the differing but equally strongly pro-interventionist positions
laid out by the US Catholic bishops and Michael Walzer.
The bishops, as noted above, treated the matter in their 1993 statement,
The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace. Within a section of the document
headed ‘An Agenda for Peacemaking’, they began their discussion by calling
attention to a ‘challenge’ by Pope John Paul II linking the cause of justice to
that of peace, following this with an activist list of what needs to be achieved
in service of justice and peace. Securing human rights and restraining
religious violence were prominent aims identified in this list. The bishops
continued by linking humanitarian intervention
intervention they described
/

as for the purpose of ‘protecting human life and basic human rights’
to /

these aims and values. Such intervention, the bishops went on, has been
termed ‘obligatory’ by the Pope ‘where the survival of populations and entire
ethnic groups is severely compromised’. In such cases, the document noted
that the Pope had described intervention as ‘a duty for nations and the
international community’. The statement continued by quoting John Paul II
still further: that when ‘populations are succumbing to the attacks of an
unjust aggressor’ there is a ‘duty to disarm the aggressor if all other means
have proved ineffective’; ‘the principles of sovereignty of states and of
noninterference in their internal affairs . . . cannot constitute a screen behind
with torture and murder may be carried out’. This was very strong language,
language which, because it was that of Pope John Paul II himself, must be
understood as committing the Catholic church as a whole, not merely the US
bishops. Fundamentally this position accords with classic just war thinking
and, as applied by the US bishops to the case of humanitarian intervention,
marks this kind of case as an exception to their general ‘presumption against
war’. After these quotations from the Pope the bishops went on to identify
‘several concerns’ at the core of their own position: ‘human life, human rights
and the welfare of the human community’; that sovereignty and noninterven-
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 119

tion are not absolutes; that nonmilitary forms of intervention should have
priority over military ones; and that nonetheless, military intervention may be
justified ‘to ensure that starving children can be fed or that whole populations
will not be slaughtered’. Perhaps aiming at marking off such use of military
force as not ruled out by their ‘presumption against war’, they followed this
by insisting that military intervention by force has to do with ‘establishing
conditions . . . for a just and stable peace’ rather than involvement in war.
Michael Walzer laid out his approach to the subject of intervention in Just
and Unjust Wars, setting the stage by summarizing what he called the ‘legalist
paradigm’ of international relations, a paradigm establishing ‘the rights of
territorial integrity and political sovereignty’ and defining threat or use of
force by one state against another’s sovereignty or territorial integrity as the
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‘criminal act’ of aggression (Walzer 1977: 61
62). Intervention, Walzer

/

continued, is almost always forbidden by this paradigm but may, in certain

exceptional cases, be justified by the same fundamental values on which the
paradigm is based. One kind of such case is that of grave violations of human
rights, and the intervention thus justified is humanitarian intervention.
Walzer required that ‘the bare survival or minimal liberty’ of significant
numbers in the society concerned must be at stake, continuing,
Against the enslavement or massacre of political opponents, national minorities, and
religious sects, there may well be no help unless help comes from outside. And when a
government turns savagely upon its own people, we may doubt the very existence of a
political community to which the idea of self-determination might apply. (Walzer 1977:
101)

In the context of the debates of the 1990s Walzer applied the term ‘rescue’ to
uses of military force justified by such circumstances, but his fundamental
position remained the same.
While both Walzer and the US Catholic bishops assumed the frame of
international order defined by the territorial conception of sovereignty, classic
just war thinking assumed a different understanding of sovereignty, the moral
obligation of the sovereign ruler to seek the common good of his or her (or
their) political community. This was defined in terms of the three funda-
mental ends of political life as laid out in Augustinian political theory: order,
justice, and peace. These were understood as interlinked, so that any threat or
disorder to one of them affected them all and undermined the common good.
‘A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs’, Augustine
had written (Questiones in Heptateuchum, x, Super Josue, as quoted in
Aquinas, Summa Theologica II/II, Q. 40, Art. 1: Aquinas 1947: 1360), and
later just war theorists interpreted this as implying ‘vindicative justice’, a
restoration of justice so as to vindicate those who have been harmed by
injustice, including punishment of evildoers, those who act against the good.
The reasoning was the same whether the evildoing came from the sovereign’s
own political community or from outside. Classic just war thought did not
rest on a distinction between uses of force directed against internal threats
and uses directed at external threats: bellum, literally ‘war’, meant the use of
force on sovereign authority for the common good, whether against internal
 120 J. T. Johnson

or external threats to that good; its opposite was duellum, use of force by
others for some private good. The bellum
duellum distinction was thus not
/

the same as the present-day external
internal distinction. All this means that
/

the sovereign might justly employ force wherever the common good was
threatened or disordered. This included uses of force to restrain or remove
tyrants, defined as persons in authority who sought their own private ends at
the expense of the common good. When Aquinas, for example, justifies the
use of armed force against a tyrant by observing, ‘It is praiseworthy to deliver
a multitude from a tyrannical rule’ (Aquinas, Summa Theologica II/II, Q. 42,
Art. 2; Aquinas 1947: 1365), this sounds not at all unlike contemporary moral
justifications of uses of armed force to respond to grave humanitarian need.
In short, sovereignty here implied the obligation to deal with such threats to
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the good, rather than implying the prima facie inviolability of territorial
borders.
These examples illustrate how different versions of just war thinking all, if
in different ways, imply the justification of using armed force for humanitar-
ian intervention, that is, armed intervention to respond to grave humanitarian
need. But just war thinking also implies restraint. Implicit or explicit in the
three examples just discussed, it is also a major theme in a fourth just war
approach to the issue of intervention, that of Paul Ramsey. While Ramsey
never directly addressed intervention for strictly humanitarian purposes, one
may argue that justification of such use of armed force can be drawn from his
basic conception of just war as rooted in the Christian obligation to love the
neighbor: to protect the neighbor from harm even at risk or cost to oneself. In
his only explicit discussion of the general problem of military intervention,
written early in the period of US involvement in Vietnam (Ramsey 1968: 19
/

41), he argued strongly for the right of states to intervene in the cause of
justice, going on to observe that the power to create justice is always
‘tragically incommensurate’ with what actually needs to be done. But, he
reasoned, not having the power to accomplish the ideal does not mean
standing aside; it means doing the best one can. Thus for him, very much in
line with classic just war thought, the right of intervention follows from the
responsibility to serve justice in the world. Yet at the same time, the decision
whether to intervene requires judgment as to the degree of justice and order
likely to be attainable and weighing of the responsibilities to the domestic
common good and the international common good, which may be in conflict.
In my own reasoning on humanitarian intervention, set down in the
context of the debate of the 1990s, I argued for an obligation to intervene in
the face of grave humanitarian need as following both from a concept of just
war closely based on the classic tradition and from international law; yet I
went on to note, in the manner of Ramsey, that in the world as it is the
practice of political decision-making is hedged about by conflicting obliga-
tions, so that the best decision is one that maximizes the various obligations
rather than the one that best discharges a single obligation. Specifically, I
argued, there are obligations to the international order, including respect for
the territorial idea of sovereignty and respect for the goal of substantial
consensus among states as to what should be done; obligations to the political
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 121

communities of one’s own states and other states that might intervene; and
not least, obligations to the members of societies targeted for intervention, for
the use of military force even for the most justified end imposes costs that
both these latter groups of people must bear (Johnson 1999: 102
116)./

Such is a brief survey of some main points of reference in the just war-
based arguments regarding humanitarian intervention as these developed in
the context of the 1990s and before. The question to be resolved after the war
to remove Saddam Hussein is not so much whether different arguments must
be made, for the arguments themselves follow closely from the moral
assumptions embedded in the conception of just war employed, but rather
the question is what judgments ought to be made on the basis of those
arguments.
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The International Law Argument

As I have noted, the Westphalian
United Nations conception of the rights of
/

sovereignty makes humanitarian intervention problematic. Walzer poses the

problem well in his characterization of the ‘legalist paradigm’: use of armed
force across the borders of a sovereign state looks, prima facie, like aggression
and is therefore outlawed. While there are exceptions and mitigations of this
general rule, the major corollary for the question of humanitarian interven-
tion is that what happens inside the boundaries of a sovereign state
even if
/

deeply repugnant to outside onlookers
remains the affair of that state, so

/

long at least as the effects do not spill over to threaten neighboring states or
international society more broadly. If there are grave abuses of human rights
as a result of domestic terrorism or a civil war, or if the government of that
state systematically and grievously abuses some or all of the state’s
population, that is a matter for the people of that state to resolve. Though
the ‘legalist paradigm’ embodies the worthy aim of protecting the indepen-
dence of states against aggression from other states, it also gives cover to
those within a state who would, under the cover of sovereignty, use power and
authority to oppress and abuse some or all those who live within the borders
of the state in question. The historical term for such abuse of power and
authority is ‘tyranny’; yet under the Westphalian paradigm it becomes
effectively one of the perquisites of sovereignty. Thus Slobodan Milošević, in
his first appearance before the International Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia, refused to accept the court’s authority to try him and rejected
the charges on which he had been indicted, asserting that, as head of state at
the time in question, he was protected by sovereign immunity. Saddam
Hussein has made similar assertions in his trial in Baghdad. Examples such as
these show the continuing strength of the ‘legalist paradigm’ grounded in the
Westphalian conception of international order.
The space carved out for the promotion of humanitarian intervention
during the debates of the 1990s, however, shows that the legacy of Westphalia
in international law is not the whole story. The other side of the matter is the
growth of respect for human rights in the international sphere. The very idea
that persons have rights deserving of international recognition and respect,
 122 J. T. Johnson

and that these rights are rooted in humanity itself, not defined by one or
another religion or granted contingently by the government under which a
person happens to live, is comparatively new in international law and still not
universally accepted. The body of diverse international statements defining
what is collectively referred to as ‘international human rights law’ is often
internally contradictory, and most of it is not ‘law’ at all in the sense of being
a universally accepted guide for conduct. Yet by the 1990s a significant
consensus had coalesced around at least certain fundamentals. This
consensus is visible in the language encountered above from the moral
debate: my own references to ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ human rights; the US
Catholic bishops’ references to ‘human life’ and ‘the welfare of the human
community’ and their concern ‘that starving children will be fed and that
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whole populations will not be slaughtered’; Walzer’s rejection of ‘the

enslavement or massacre of political opponents, national minorities, and
religious sects’ and actions of a government which ‘turns savagely against its
own people’. Such language reflects ideas found in major documents which
have contributed to the development of international human rights law,
including especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the
Genocide Convention. The language of such documents, and the claims made
in them, establish a relationship of some tension with the idea of sovereignty
rooted in Westphalian conceptions and its corollary, the doctrine of non-
intervention (see further The International Commission on Intervention and
State Sovereignty [ICISS below] 2001b: 3
26).
/

In response to this tension what one finds in the realm of international law
is evidence of a kind of sea-change, strong in some quarters but less so in
others, which seeks to redefine the idea of sovereignty to take account of
human rights concerns (see further ICISS 2001b: 11). Arguably the most
forthright statement of such a revised concept, connecting it specifically to the
possibility of humanitarian intervention by military and other means, is The
Responsibility to Protect, the report of the ad hoc International Commission
on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS 2001a). Among its ‘core
principles’ the following are especially relevant to the question of intervention
(ICISS 2001a: xi):1

Basic principles:
A. State sovereignty implies responsibility, and the primary responsi-
bility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.
B. Where a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal
war, insurgency, repression or state failure, and the state in question is
unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention
yields to the international responsibility to protect.

Elements:
A. The responsibility to prevent: to address both the root causes and
direct causes of internal conflict and other man-made crises putting
populations at risk.
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 123

B. The responsibility to react: to respond to situations of compelling

human need with appropriate measures, which may include coercive
measures like sanctions and international prosecution, and in extreme
cases military intervention.
C. The responsibility to rebuild: to provide, particularly after a military
intervention, full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconcilia-
tion, addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was designed to
halt or avert.

As regards international law, these principles constitute only lex ferenda, what
is thought should be law, and not the actual positive law defined by
international agreements.2 It is not unreasonable to argue, though, that by
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the time they were published they reflected important precedents that
manifested the kind of consensus which defines customary international
law: the precedents of Bosnia, Kosovo, and in a different way, Rwanda after
the 1994 genocide. At the time The Responsibility to Protect was being
prepared the first two of these looked like cases showing the positive benefits
of military intervention and subsequent involvement in societal rebuilding.
Both were cases in which international cooperation was considerable (though
the role of the United Nations organisation itself was not primary in the case
of Bosnia and was clearly after the fact in the case of Kosovo). Rwanda, by
contrast, provided a kind of worst-case precedent: here was what might go
wrong unless relatively minimal, though timely, international intervention
took place.
It is not at all clear that these precedental cases look quite the same today.
In both Bosnia and Kosovo it has proved much easier to insert military forces
to stop the oppression and restore basic public order than to rebuild a well
functioning society that will not collapse back into disorder and other forms
of oppression. In Rwanda, despite the international hand-wringing that
followed the realization that a genocidal massacre had occurred, there has
been no international commitment to rebuilding that society comparable to
what has been done in Bosnia and Kosovo. Indeed, in retrospect an
important lesson of the first two cases is that of limited capability: stopping
grievous oppression is one thing, but assisting a society to rebuild takes
resources and time which are by nature limited and which may be needed to
respond to other needs, either in the donors’ own societies or in other
oppressed societies themselves deserving of interventionary assistance. In the
case of Rwanda the principal lesson, in retrospect, is that of limited will
(though capacity may also be cited: the international community is able to do
only so much, and its resources were already strained by the needs of the
former Yugoslavia). If one adds the example of post-Operation Iraqi
Freedom, post-Saddam Hussein Iraq to these cases, I suggest that the
cautionary lessons I have mentioned are intensified, and some new ones are
added as well. Indeed, though I was asked to write this paper on the subject of
humanitarian intervention after Iraq, the broader issue is the status of the
idea of humanitarian intervention after Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq:
 124 J. T. Johnson

the experience of all these cases affects reflection and judgment on the matter
of such intervention as a whole.
A further dimension of the issue is that, despite the respect widely given to
The Responsibility to Protect and the larger penumbra of thinking about how
to serve both the cause of human rights and the cause of nonintervention as
provided for in the conception of sovereignty rooted in Westphalia, positive
international law and the structure of international institutions remain
unchanged. This, I suggest, seems likely to be the case for the foreseeable
future. Such a state of affairs does not necessarily imply the triumph of a
hostile attitude towards humanitarian intervention, for the groundswell of
support for such intervention during the 1990s developed in precisely such a
legal and institutional context. Attractive as it may be to supporters of
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humanitarian intervention for such changes to take place, there is sufficient

room in the present system for such intervention.

How Should We Think About Humanitarian Intervention in the Future?

As observed in the supplementary volume to The Responsibility to Protect,
(ICISS 2001b: 67), a survey of the military interventions that took place
during the first 45 years of the United Nations’ existence shows that
humanitarian rationales were offered numerous times, but that these
justifications were often abused as ‘a common feature of state practice’.
This corresponds with Walzer’s comment in Just and Unjust Wars that when
he looked for cases of humanitarian intervention, he found no pure ones. The
ICISS supplementary volume also, in the same place, notes several important
interventions in the 1970s (in East Pakistan, Idi Amin’s Uganda, and Pol
Pot’s Cambodia) in which the justifying rationale offered by the intervening
states was self-defence, but a humanitarian rationale would have been
appropriate and the interventions had the result of ending egregious
humanitarian abuses. Of these cases, the supplementary volume concludes
further that they challenge ‘the conventional wisdom that disinterested,
multilateral humanitarian interventions necessarily produce greater benefits
to populations in distress than ones that are self-interested and undertaken by
a state acting alone’ (ICISS 2001b: 68).
While the thrust of the recommendations offered in The Responsibility to
Protect is towards regularizing and facilitating humanitarian intervention as
a multilateral activity within the framework of the United Nations, these
observations from the supplementary volume suggest the possibility of an
alternative future that looks much like the past: one in which the United
Nations is not at the center of focus, but humanitarian intervention remains
as a possibility for individual states as well as alliances and ad hoc coalitions
of states, with national-interest motivations mixed with more altruistic ones.
Such a future will not satisfy those who imagine a ‘pure’ form of
humanitarian intervention, use of military force only for altruistic reasons
of protecting human rights, ending abuses, and correcting them, devoid of
national-interest motivations. But while claims of national interest can clearly
be used to wrong purposes
not least importantly, when a tyrant claims
/
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 125

national sovereignty as a cover for the sorts of abuses that might occasion
humanitarian intervention
a government that does not take into account
/

the interests of its own society when acting internationally is not fulfilling the
fundamental responsibility of all good government to seek the good of the
people for whom it is responsible.
To focus on the United Nations as providing the ideal framework for
humanitarian intervention also seems misplaced. One does not, of course,
know what the results of reorganization of this international body will be, but
the history of the United Nations in regard to humanitarian intervention
hardly makes for confidence. All the interventions from the 1970s cited above
as examples of humanitarian success were undertaken by states; the Dayton
Accords, and not activities centered in the United Nations, led to a successful
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form of intervention in Bosnia; it was NATO, and not the United Nations,
that acted to intervene in Kosovo. If one takes seriously the egregious
violations of fundamental human rights carried out over a long history by
Saddam Hussein and his regime, the failure of the Security Council to take
action contrasts markedly with the action of the US and British-led coalition
to remove him and his regime and to seek a rebuilding of the political shape
of Iraq. The failure of the United Nations to prevent the genocidal massacres
of Srebrenica and Rwanda, despite its peacekeeping presence in both places,
provides conspicuous reminders of UN disfunctionality in regard to the use
of military force for humanitarian purposes. Indeed, the structure of the UN
is such that clear purpose and effective command and control are virtually
unimaginable.
As for the matter of multilateralism in general, its major virtue in regard to
the actual use of military force in intervention for humanitarian purposes is
that it conveys a sense of international consensus that the intervention is
called for; a single state or a small group of states may carry through the
military action more effectively. The greater virtue of multilateralism lies in
the arena of rebuilding, where the needs may be expected to surpass what any
one state or small group of states can reasonably be expected to supply, where
diverse talents, experience, and expertise can usefully complement one
another, and where the presence of representatives of many different societies
signals a broad concern for the society being rebuilt.
I have argued in detail elsewhere, as noted above, that there is clear reason
to hold that there is an obligation to intervene to prevent, halt, and seek to
remedy serious abuses of basic human rights, but this obligation exists
alongside others: obligations to the international community as a whole,
obligations to one’s own society, obligations not to do more harm than good
in the society targeted for intervention. These obligations all need to be
served, and good statecraft has to determine how to do so in such a way that
honors them all. The balance among them shifts from situation to situation,
and it is far from clear that there is a ‘one size fits all’ solution
such as
/

requiring intervention in some circumstances, and requiring that it take place

under UN auspices and be multilateral. Rather, the decision to intervene is
perhaps ineluctably political
that is, one which requires exercise of the art of
/

statecraft
and while one may hope that different governments will reach the
/
 126 J. T. Johnson

same conclusions in given cases, there still should be a place for unilateral
action, as in the three cases from the 1970s mentioned above. Just as serving
national interest is not inherently bad, neither is acting unilaterally.
But anyone serious about humanitarian intervention would be wise to heed
the lessons of Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq: military force may halt
humanitarian abuse and remove those responsible from power, but by itself it
is ill suited to rebuild a society so that such abuses will not recur; such
rebuilding is a far more complicated task and requires a considerable
investment of money, personnel, and time. Moreover, what early modern
political philosophers called ‘virtue’ is needed in the population in question,
and especially after a long history of human rights abuses, such virtue may
itself have to be reconstructed from scratch. Humanitarian intervention, in
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short, is a much larger matter than the use of military force in itself, and the
very size and complexity of the task of restoring a society devastated by
abuses of fundamental rights argues that such intervention has to be the
exception rather than a rule in international affairs.

Notes
1
This report also lays out a version of the just war idea under the rubric, ‘Principles for Military
Intervention’ (ICISS 2001a: xii
/xiii).
2
The Responsibility to Protect concludes with several recommendations to the General Assembly of the
United Nations calling on it to ‘adopt a draft declaratory resolution embodying the basic principles of
the responsibility to protect’ (ICISS 2001a: 74).

References
Aquinas, T. (1947) Summa Theologica (New York et al.: Benziger Brothers, Inc).
Bush, G. W. (2002) Address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, 2002, published as
‘In Bush’s Words: On Iraq, U.N. Must Face Up to Its Founding Purpose’, New York Times,
September 13, 2002, p. A10.
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001a) The Responsibility to Protect
(Ottawa: International Development Research Centre).
International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001b) The Responsibility To Protect:
Research, Bibliography, Background (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre).
Johnson, J. T. (1975) Ideology, Reason, and the Limitation of War (Princeton, NJ, and Guildford, Surrey:
Princeton University Press).
Johnson, J. T. (1999) Morality and Contemporary Warfare (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press).
Johnson, J. T. & Weigel, G. (1991) Just War and the Gulf War (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy
Center).
National Conference of Catholic Bishops (1983) The Challenge of Peace (Washington, DC: United States
Catholic Conference).
National Conference of Catholic Bishops (1993) The Harvest of Justice Is Sown in Peace (Washington, DC:
United States Catholic Conference).
Ramsey, P. (1961) War and the Christian Conscience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Ramsey, P. (1968) The Just War: Force and Political Responsibility (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (2003) Statement on Iraq (Washington, DC: United States
Catholic Conference).
Walzer, M. (1977) Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books).
 Humanitarian Intervention after Iraq 127

Biographies
James Turner Johnson is Professor of Religion and Associate Member of
the Graduate Department of Political Science at Rutgers, where he has been
on the faculty since 1969. His research and teaching have focused principally
on the historical development and application of moral traditions related to
war, peace, and the practice of statecraft. His books include Ideology, Reason,
and the Limitation of War (Princeton, 1975), Just War Tradition and the
Restraint of War (Princeton, 1981), Can Modern War Be Just? (Yale, 1984),
The Quest for Peace: Three Moral Traditions in Western Cultural History
(Princeton, 1987), The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions (Penn
State, 1997), Morality and Contemporary Warfare (Yale, 1999), and (edited
with John Kelsay) Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and
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Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (Greenwood, 1990) and

Just War and Jihad: Historical and Theoretical Perspectives on War and Peace
in Western and Islamic Traditions (Greenwood, 1991).