Abstract
This chapter is a case study in which the principles presented earlier are put to the test of a concrete example: the Gulf War of 1990–1. In ‘Desert Justice?’ David Fisher asks how far Christian just war criteria were applied in practice, and how far they stood up to the test of that application. His answer (in which he expresses his own views, not necessarily to be taken as reflecting official policy or thinking) is that they performed well, and that the war itself can be judged to have been a just one for that reason. The next section, ‘The Gulf War: Another Christian view’, for which Roger Williamson and Brian Wicker are responsible, then inserts a note of Christian scepticism about that conclusion, and suggests that it rests on the omission of some essential analytical elements. The chapter continues with two Muslim responses: first an analysis by Judge Al-Hajri of Qatar of the legality of the invasion of Kuwait under Islamic international law; and second an overview of Muslim reactions to the war as a whole, largely contributed by Abdel and Harfiyah Haleem, but with the concurrence of Zaki Badawi and Haifa Jawaad.
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Notes
See David Fisher, Morality and the Bomb (London: Croom Helm, 1985; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1985). This book was the outcome of a debate held in Oxford in Hilary Term 1984 between Fisher and the then Master of Balliol, Anthony Kenny, both sides of which were published.
See also Anthony Kenny, The Logic of Deterrence (London: Firethorn Press, 1985).
Francis X. Winters SJ, ‘Freedom to resist coercion: Augustine, Aquinas, Vitoria’, Commonweal, 118 (1991). The US debate is well summarized in John Langan, ‘The just war theory after the Gulf War’, Theological Studies, 53 (1992), pp. 1–18.
Philip Crowe, ‘The doctrine of a just war’, in CWN Series, 26 October 1990, pp. 8–9.
Roger Williamson, Just War in the Gulp (Uppsala, Sweden: Life and Peace Institute, 1991).
Franciscus de Vitoria, De Indis Recenter Inventis et de Jure Belli Hispanorum in Barbaros, ed. Walter Schatzel (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebech), 1952), No. 13.
Naom Chomsky, ‘The use (and abuse) of the United Nations’, in Micah L. Sifry and Christopher Cerf (eds), The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions (New York: Random House, 1991).
Lawrence Freedman and Efraim Karsh, The Gulf Conflict 1990–1991 (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), p. 212.
Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of Ages (London: Duckworth, 1971), Chapters 15 and 16.
See also Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 44–5.
Sir Peter de la Billiere, Storm Command, A Personal Account of the Gulf War (London: HarperCollins, 1992) p. 279.
Aeschylus, Agamennon, v. 211, quoted in Kenneth Dover, The Greeks (BBC Publications, 1980), p. 86.
William Ames, ‘Conscience, with the power and cases thereof’, quoted in James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason and the Limitation of War (Princeton University Presss, 1975), p. 199. But see also above, pp. 117–18 and p. 130, and note 23.
Roger Williamson, Just War in the Gulp (Stockholm: Life and Peace Institute, 2nd ed., 5 September 1991).
See Roger Williamson, in Brien Hallett (ed.), Engulfed in War (University of Hawaii, 1991), p. 57. Williamson points out that Bush’s intention to avoid another Vietnam in the desert implied that the US was preparing a crushing air-onslaught with a probability of high Iraqi casualty figures: ‘No price was too heavy to pay’ to achieve Iraqi withdrawal, Bush had said.
See Barrie Paskins on intentions in nuclear deterrence, in ‘Deep cuts are morally imperative’, in Geoffrey Goodwin (ed.), Ethics and Nuclear Deterrence (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 99: avoiding war ‘is indeed the motivation of our deterrent activity, but intention and motive are different things. What I intend to do is what I judge, correctly or incorrectly, to lie within my power to do … What I hope thereby to achieve is a further good, beyond my unaided powers’.
Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992).
Khurram Murad, ‘Book Review’, The Muslim World Book Review 17(3) Spring 1997, The Islamic Foundation, Leicester, pp. 3–11.
Ibid., p. 11; Murad refers to two articles by Ali Mazrui and Richard Falk in T. Y. Ismael and J. Ismael, The Gulf War and the New World Order: The International Relations of the Middle East (Gainesville: Florida Press, 1994).
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© 1998 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Haleem, H.A., Ramsbotham, O., Risaluddin, S., Wicker, B. (1998). Christian and Muslim Approaches to the Gulf War, 1990–1. In: Haleem, H.A., Ramsbotham, O., Risaluddin, S., Wicker, B. (eds) The Crescent and the Cross. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26440-7_6
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