Intervention -- Can it be justified?

The arrest of Ratko Mladic takes eveyone back to some of the darkest parts of late 20th century European history and the Balkan wars of the 1990's. In July 1995 in the town of Srebrenica, some 8,500 muslims were massacred by Bosnian Serb forces under the noses of a United Nations peacekeeping force of some 700 Dutch marines and a lack of action and will by the West European governments including Britain and France. The pangs of guilt at this inaction have echoes in today's approaches to intervention in Libya.

 

Srebrenica - Could we have done more?


When the residents of Misrata were threatened with death by Colonel Gadaffi's forces,there were fears on the Western side that a lack of intervention in the Libyan conflict could have lead to massacres on the same scale as Srebrenica in the past. This explains the intervention in Libya but the prospects for success here are problematical and we could be in for a very long haul. When might such an intervention justified?

It must be emphasisied that although there is a general abhorrence of war,in some cases it can be justifed on the following grounds, rooted in the teachings of the catholic theologian St.Thomas Aquinas and also in the work of muslim scholars.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in paragraph 2309, lists four strict conditions for "legitimate defense by military force":

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power as well as the precision of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

Interestingly, these guidelines do not specifically mention civil war which we do have in Libya, however they do provide a very useful guideline to this position. In the case of Libya I am not sure that all these tests were properly assessed by the West but the echoes of Srebrenica probably dictated the course of events.If there is intervention in Libya, then why not in Syria,whose people in may ways are suffering much more than the Libyan rebels? Presumably the Western powers have decided that the prospects of a successful intervention in Libya are greater than in Syria. Therefore, a particular intervention in a specific situation might be justified on several grounds but may be abandoned on the grounds that the prospects of a morally good intervention being successful are too remote to carry it out. Therefore we can only do good if we think we can pull it off? In the final analysis this is more of a pragmatic approach rather than an ethical one. Perhaps we can only intervene when we have a good chance of making a difference.

We were in a position to make a diference in Srebrenica,less so in Syria. Where might this lead in terms of other "just" interventions in the future?