14 Comments »

1. So newspapers can only believe information that comes directly from the PMs office?
   Oh yeh like WMD – silly me

   Comment by Roger Huffadine — 22 May 2004 on 11:58 am | Link

2. It really won’t do, you know. There were no WMD -especially not big ones "ready to use at 45 minutes notice" [Tony Blair]. So we invaded another country on false pretext. Our allies have been revealed as torturers. We killed 10,000+ Iraqis without good reason (isn’t that murder?). Our only honourable course of action is (a) admit the error (b) bring the army home (c) sack the Prime Minister – who should resign at once if he had a conscience (d) offer to pay for the damage.

   Comment by hugh — 22 May 2004 on 8:21 pm | Link

3. Honourable course of action?!?! Mate, we’re talking about the GOVERNMENT!!! There isn’t a single ounce of honour in every MP in the country; there is only personal gain and political expediency.

   Comment by PapaLazzzaru — 22 May 2004 on 11:24 pm | Link

4. I’m not sure what to make of this anymore.

   IF you want your troops to come home, then abandon all hope of paying reasonable gas prices at the pumps – it is the insecurity of the region driving up those futures prices and having a direct impact on your experience at the petrol station.

   I’m not saying it’s not worth thinking about, but it’s important that if you do so you do NOT sound like someone who hasn’t even thought through what this really means.

   The region is destabilized; it either gets stable, or the world oil supply is endangered, as is your ability to fill up your gas tank.

   I’m not saying don’t say it – I’m saying don’t say it like you read it off of a cardboard box with your breakfast cereal. You may not like the fine print.

   Comment by Gregory Block — 22 May 2004 on 11:37 pm | Link

5. We don’t use gas. We’re British.

   Comment by Young Fogey — 24 May 2004 on 1:33 am | Link

6. Congratulations on seeing the trees for the forest.

   Comment by Gregory Block — 24 May 2004 on 10:37 am | Link

7. Gregory, I agree that intervention was for oil, and as users of the oil it is uncertain moral ground to condemn the intervention whilst benefitting from it.

   Firstly we can definately condemn the government for lying. The idea of defending the war on the grounds of oil may seem pragmatic now, but it was unthinkable in pro-war minds a while back and i would imagine that it is unthinkable in official minds now.

   Secondly, I don’t buy petrol, I use buses & trains (although as has been proved, you can now buy a car and enough petrol to drive to manchester for less than the cost of a ticket), so I can complain (can i though? isn’t our entire society run on oil?) – but how much good has this done to the price of petrol? its just gone up hasn’t it? and what would have happened without intervention? surely there is now far more instability because of the intervention. Whatever faults Saddam Hussein had (and yes there were a lot of them, and I am glad he has gone) he at least managed to control his country. And it seems the problem of human rights abuses hasn’t exactly left Iraq, although now its just the unwanted wielders of authority perpetrating the offenses (hmm, sounds familiar).

   Sir Thomas Aquinas laid down eight principles for a "just" war.

   One of them was something like:
   The evil caused by having the war should not outweigh the evil which would have resulted had there not been a war.

   Can this one be said to have been passed?

   Comment by lodjer — 24 May 2004 on 1:11 pm | Link

8. The point being, the price of petrol should account for two things: First and foremost, market forces; which it does. The whole point of the free market is that it should be influenced by the actions of those in the market – so if the Government really cared about the price of oil, they wouldn’t have become involved in a war in Iraq in the first place. If oil came before people, the best strategy for handling the oil reserves in the short term would have been to keep hands off.

   But the war happened; and with it came the current instability in the region. The market has reacted; it extrapolates the risk in the region to a higher price in oil futures, raising the real price of oil contracts as a result.

   Once the decision to go to war was made, nothing would have prevented the price of oil from going up – but only stability in the region would have prevented the current stratospheric heights.

   The second thing it needs to cover is the true environmental cost of oil; which road tax and the taxation on oil, in theory, does. Or should do. Any failure for it to do so is, again, the failure of the government, and not of the purpose.

   As for the last: Aquinas was referring to the long-term results of the war, not the short term impact; short term impact of war is death, usually of many people you’d prefer weren’t dead. Aquinas’ Just War theory was an attempt to create a moral founding for war, created in the third century and formalised by him 10 centuries later. Often argued as the only way for Christian peoples to justify war, there’s a lot of room for interpretation. The aim of the theory is to prove that fighting a war can be morally superior to overlooking it; whether or not it supports, for example, a "first strike" is questionable, nor is it clear whether it is to judge the intentions or the actual results of the war.

   Overlapping "just war" theories have been produced by the Stoics, Aquinas, Rawls, Finley, Nussbaum, Gomez-Lobo, and a ton of others; they overlap on reasons which involve protecting life, human social existence (family, friendship, etc.), self-determination (individual or collective), equal basic value of persons (not the same as equal rights), integirity understood as internal harmony or consistency, and awareness and knowledge.

   Pacifism (regarding war) holds the view that under no conditions is fighting a war ever just; JWT holds that war is sometimes justifiable.

   More importantly, Prescriptive Political Realism, which incorporates the idea of national self-interest in explaining state action or justification of such, differs; the view of Descriptive PR is that nation states DO act only in their own perceived self-interests, but occasionally act for moral reasons that aren’t optimal behavior; Prescriptive PR is the view that nation states SHOULD only act in their own self-interests. PPR entails it would be wrong to approach based on moral values apart from national interest.

   Worse yet, even utilitarianism can acknowledge that sacrifice of human rights of a vulnerable group for the sake of the greater satisfaction or happiness of a small privileged elite or a large but already relatively priveleged group is acceptable. So Utilitarianism can’t defend JWS; in fact, it can often be a pretty damning.

   JWT is one part of modern Just Intervention Theory, which flows from relatively mild criticism up through denunciation, collective denunciation, limited economic sanctions, total economic boycott, embargo, small-scale violent interventions, and invasions; there’s also a track of JIT for internal change – verbal encouragement of reform movements, up through material support for reform movements, nonviolent single-issue movements, outright support for opposition parties, and violent oppositional forces.

   JWT has become much more developed over time – but continues to be pretty controversial, even if it is followed rather closely by modern interventionist governments.

   Comment by Gregory Block — 24 May 2004 on 1:47 pm | Link

9. How can Aquinas be said to be referring ONLY to the long term effects of the war? – As I have put it it is a fairly utilitarian principle (he may have put it differently, i dont remember exactly), it could be reduced to simple head-counting (where the heads are still available) so why only long term effect? it is the effect – any effect, we are trying to evaluate.

   Comment by lodjer — 24 May 2004 on 4:09 pm | Link

10. …Utilitarianism supports persecution of small groups in the interests of the larger group – never invoke utilitarianism alongside human rights.

    All war, by definition, creates immediate casualties; Aquinas was trying to point out that on a timeline of two realities – one with intervention, and one without – one could justify war if the war timeline could be seen as having a better outcome, along his JWT, than the non-war timeline.

    Arguably, JWT as it was then isn’t getting used anymore; most people tend to argue towards a descriptive PR based on actual behavior of democratic nations, and prescriptive PR based on non-democratic types.

    Comment by Gregory Block — 26 May 2004 on 12:58 am | Link

11. Well, i am a little lost here. Suffice to say, thanks Gregory, I’ll read all that a few more times, and perhaps get the jist of it.

    I am still sure I will think intervention was a bad move tho 😉

    Comment by lodjer — 26 May 2004 on 9:58 am | Link

12. I have no doubt; knowing the history of just intervention and descriptive PR hasn’t made me feel OK about it.

    Hell, descriptive PR basically says "Governments may sometimes be expected to do something stupid", whereas proscriptive says "Governments must not do stupid things".

    Not entirely fair, but hey, neither was bombing a bunch of innocent civilians with "smart bombs" or mowing down wedding parties (you know, they all look like terrorist camps to a spy satellite, I guess)…

    Comment by Gregory Block — 27 May 2004 on 2:19 pm | Link

13. when looking at some of the comments already posted i do wonder about peoples level of knowlage when objecting to the iraqi war. for example one person said especially not big ones refering to WMD’s. WMD’s stands for wepons of mass destruction so there is no grey area regarding size…they are all big. also the reasons for war are far more than the oil or coz we are bushes puppets. everything is proportional and if you regard the marxist view if we are getting some were and good prevails life lost and cost is unimportant. i do not believe this however i do believe that freeing a country from oppression and taking out a war monger, power hungry dictator such as sadam was a bonus. has everyone forgotten the 1st gulf war because i seem 2 remember our soldiers lifes being lost because someone invaided kuwait and broke universal codes of conduct. so people get your facts right before you critisize and just the fact that preeching on here makes you feel high and mighty doesnt make the middle east any safer or a resolution any closer…you pricks!

    Comment by alex — 11 Dec 2006 on 8:17 pm | Link

14. when looking at some of the comments already posted i do wonder about peoples level of knowlage when objecting to the iraqi war. for example one person said especially not big ones refering to WMD’s. WMD’s stands for wepons of mass destruction so there is no grey area regarding size…they are all big. also the reasons for war are far more than the oil or coz we are bushes puppets. everything is proportional and if you regard the marxist view if we are getting some were and good prevails life lost and cost is unimportant. i do not believe this however i do believe that freeing a country from oppression and taking out a war monger, power hungry dictator such as sadam was a bonus. has everyone forgotten the 1st gulf war because i seem 2 remember our soldiers lifes being lost because someone invaided kuwait and broke universal codes of conduct. so people get your facts right before you critisize and just the fact that preeching on here makes you feel high and mighty doesnt make the middle east any safer or a resolution any closer…you pricks!

    Comment by alex — 11 Dec 2006 on 8:17 pm | Link

---

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Post a public comment

Name (required)
E-mail (required)
(You must give an email address, but it will not be displayed to the public.)
Website
(You may give your website, and it will be displayed to the public.)

Comments:

This is not a way of contacting the Prime Minister. If you would like to contact the Prime Minister, go to the 10 Downing Street official site.

Privacy note: Shortly after posting, your name and comment will be displayed on the site. This means that people searching for your name on the Internet will be able to find and read your comment.