Utopia, you are standing in it!

John Rawls’ Law of Peoples had as its key point that the fundamental division is not between democratic and non-democratic peoples or liberal and non-liberal, but decent and non-decent or outlaw peoples. Decent peoples allow toleration and subscribe to eight principles:

1. Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples.

2. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings.

3. Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them.

4. Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention.

5. Peoples have the right of self-defence but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defence.

6. Peoples are to honour human rights.

7. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war.

8. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavourable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime.

Libertarians such as Murray Rothbard define a just war thus:

· A just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination; and

· A war is unjust, when a people try to impose domination on another people, or try to retain an already existing coercive rule over them.

A condition for a just war is force may be used only after all peaceful and viable alternatives have been seriously tried and exhausted or are clearly not practical.

Most of all, save me from self-styled anti-war activists what Matt Welch called temporary doves. Temporary doves spit bile at those that support the wars they oppose – denouncing them as moral pigmies. The temporary doves then make exceptions for the wars they support and spite bile once again at those that question the whimsical nature and application of their values about just and unjust wars and the just conduct of wars.

The wars championed by the temporary doves can be equally or more bloody in civilian casualties as the wars they oppose either because of the reasons they were started or because of how these wars are conducted – civilian casualties In Iraq and Afghanistan.

Civilian casualties are put forward by the temporary doves as a moral trump card against the Iraq and Afghan wars and the atomic bombings. Many of the architects and champions of the NATO bombings in the Kosovo war opposed Gulf War II. Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein, was described as a modern-day Hitler, eager to practice genocide against minorities and menace peaceful neighbours.

Is Bill Clinton a war criminal because he bombed Iraq and Sudan, but a human rights hero because he bombed Serbia? All of these bombings resulted in civilian deaths.

The supporters of both wars frequently invoked the Munich Agreement of 1938 and sought regime change. Perhaps less bloody but certainly slower social and political emancipation from oppression and mass murder is OK for the temporary doves for Iraq and Afghanistan but not for Kosovo. Temporary doves are just as prepared to wade up to their armpits in civilian casualties as the next warmonger, but they then put themselves forward as free of sin when they call for war crimes trials and citizen’s arrests of those that supported and conducted equally bloody wars.

Edward Luttwick argued that the Kosovo war proved that precision modern air bombardments can be effective as humanitarian interventions only in unique circumstances:

• An enemy sufficiently economically developed to offer targets worth bombing, and
• sufficiently democratic to respond to the inconvenience thereby inflicted on civilians at large; and
• yet sufficiently primitive and authoritarian to become the target of a humanitarian bombing campaign in the first place.

In most cases, from the Taliban’s Afghanistan to Zaire and from Rwanda to Sierra Leone, there were no identifiable, high-value, and relevant targets. In Bosnia, the post-heroic behaviour of almost all peacekeeping troops in UN service ranged from doing little or nothing to protect civilians while engaging in every possible form of misconduct, from black-market trafficking to cowardly passivity in the face of mass murder.