1 Some theorists group under discrimination actions that involve inflicting excess military losses. I should prefer to group such actions under proportionality. The torture and execution of prisoners fall however under the principle of discrimination.

2 For a clear and thoughtful statement of ius in bello one might turn to the pastoral letter of the U.S. Catholic bishops on war and peace in a nuclear age. The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response, (CTS/SPCK). London, 1983, pp. 29–32Google Scholar.

3 In the Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August, 1949, a relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts ((Protocol) (177) there are clear definitions:

4 The genesis of such attitudes between the British and the Germans is the leitmotif of the distinguished study by Paul Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo‐German Antagonism 1860–1914, (Allen and Unwin), London, 1980.

5 Donald Nicholl in an article in The Tablet (1 June, 1991) makes a point similar to the argument in this paragraph: '…Ignaz Maybaum has percipiently commented: “The genocide of Auschwitz began in Verdun…the inhumanity of Auschwitz began with the inhumanity of the trench warfare of 1914‐18.” As well as the line leading from Verdun to Auschwitz there is a further branch line leading to the slaughter‐house of Dresden in 1945, that of Hiroshima and of Vietnam/Cambodia and—the latest in line—Iraq/Kuwait/Kurdistan.

6 Church Dogmatics, III/4, p. 149 (Eng. trans.: T. & T. Clark, 1961).

7 In another paper I have tried to take a broader look at the issue of justice in the Gulf War: “Les ambiguityés de la justice”, L'Événement Europén, March 1991, No. 13, pp. 137–148.

8 I would like to argue that a marvellous opportunity for making sanctions work—in particular, there was gross underestimation of the effect of revenue loss on the Iraqi government as it proved almost completely unable to sell its oil—that might have provided a most salutary contemporary precedent was lost, even if it is acknowledged that sanctions were likely to take a long time; and an opportunity was also missed for creating a new international atmosphere in which war options were taken up more slowly and reluctantly than in the past.

9 Let me state in an overall way my personal position on the Western intervention to Stan the Gulf war. In the last resort I could not bring myself to support the war or to judge it a Jjust war in spite of my rejection of the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait and my desire to see it reversed. First, the war began too soon and its initiators lost the opportunity to make sanctions work and to enable Arab and other brokerage to prove effective. Second, I cannot condone in terms of a principle of discrimination the tremendous destruction of the Iraqi economy—though I acknowledge a genuine attempt to avoid civilian deaths—that will harm Iraqi living standards and reduce life expectations for at least a generation among a poor people. Third, though various longer term objectives have been formulated—and they have mostly been formulated in a vague and generalised way—I believe that this war has been started with insufficient understanding of its longer term effects as well as little grasp of the implications of contemporary global technology and political organization. I believe also that this war has proved a setback to trends against war that were developing in the Western world—relations between the former enemies who now constitute the European Community are a significant example; and I only hope that we have not been provided with a new and malign prototype of behaviour for dealing with the Third World. In this connection too some harm has been done to the legitimacy of the United Nations which has allowed its authority to fall excessively into the hands of a partisan group of nations. I simply hope that in those Western countries that have led this war its short‐sighted and cruel nature will with time be recognised and appropriate conclusions drawn for participating in the construction of a more intelligent and just world order than the present breakdown of international order would appear to herald. Finally, it may be objected to the personal position that I am stating that at some stage the question had to be answered: what should be done if sanctions did not work? In reply I accept that at that stage there would have been a much better case for going to war. However by that time also many other issues might have come into better perspective. In any case the question/objection is speculative: sanctions were not given an opportunity to work—though the present situation shows how powerfully they work against Iraq.

On the Iraqi side the war was entirely unjust: its regime had no just reason for annexing Kuwait; it did not sensibly negotiate before the war began; it made calculations of momentous stupidity and folly in judging what world happen to its country and military; and it violated discrimination specifically in firing deliberately missiles against Israeli civilians as well as indiscriminately into Saudi Arabian cities, by holding foreign citizens prisoner in militarily exposed places, by pouring oil into the Persian Gulf, by stripping the country of its modem infrastructure and equipment by wantonly destroying the public buildings and offices of Kuwait, the electricity and desalinisation plants, radio and television studios, oil installations and wells, looting private homes, museums, stealing vehicles, treating civilians with brutality, and carrying out arbitrary and random killings.

10 Over‐extended comparisons of Saddam Hussein with Hiller were constantly made by Western politicians and journalists.

11 William M. Arkin, Damian Durrant, and Marianne Chemi write perceptively: ‘There is no denying that the public, and public opinion, became a third force [on the Western side] in the conflict. Through the shared consent of the conduct of the war, the public imposed certain expectations as to proper and acceptable behavior.’Modern Warfare and the Environment: A Case Study of the Gulf War (Greenpeace, London, 1991). p.146Google Scholar

12 Arkin and his co‐authors write: ‘The force and decisiveness of the application of modem weapons, and the heretofore unexperienced power of an efficient electronic armed force working in synergy astonished Iraq, the public, and the allied military itself’. Op. cit., p. 146

13 One of the problems arising for Iraq from the war's destructiveness was that a highly urbanised country had come to depend on contemporary technology in its infrastructure and was, in consequence, in a certain sense more immediately deprived than a country that had made fewer advances towards modem technological conditions.

14 Matitiahu Peled (general in the Israeli reserve), Le Monde Diplomatique, Juin, 1991, p.5.

15 Most likely 100,000–120,000 Iraqi soldiers were killed during the war, some half of them during the four days of the ground war at the end of the conflict. Some 350 allied soldiers were killed: see the careful discussion in Arkin's book.

16 Ed Vulliamy reports (Weekend Guardian, May 18–19, 1991, p. 5): ‘It was not merely the transformers in the water plants that were bombed [in the allied offensive], but the giant Japanese‐built turbines themselves, which cannot be repaired under the embargo.’

17 There has been the paradox that the Gulf war was waged to restore the sovereignty of a country (Kuwait) but in the aftermath of the war the plight of the Kurds—but not the Shi'as—was thought sufficient by Western countries to set aside the sovereignty of another country (Iraq).

18 Nicholl again—in the article already cited—has most perceptive things to say about the lack of educated dissent in Britain when compared to the United States. Archbishop Winning of Glasgow sensitively expressed a religious position in saying that he was not speaking for his people but he was speaking to them.

19 There was a superficial sense in which the American intervention in the Gulf resembled the gunboat diplomacy of the colonial period of the industrial revolution. The reality is however different and more serious. The intervention may have owed something to the mores of an earlier period but it has taken place in a world that has grown small. interdependent and dangerous with new technological production, trade and communication and that has begun to realise—without doing much that is constructive about it as yet—that world resources in their present forms of consumption are limited and that prevailing patterns of consumption remain possible only because some three quarters of the world consume much less than its developed one quarter. It is significant that the present war was dominantly about access to a crucial resource, energy. I have tried to tease out the wider implications of the war in a paper that was re‐worked to present as evidence to the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Commons: “Peace in the Gulf: The Shape of the End and the Making of the Future” in Foreign Affairs Committee, Third Report, The Middle East after the Gulf War, Vol. II, Appendix 4, pp. 256–263.

20 During the Gulf crisis Third World countries mostly locked on with resentment as a great and technologically developed country. the United States, pounded into the dust the infra‐structure of a poor country with a cruel and foolish leader. That example may well not be forgotten when new and more militarily powerful and revisionist contenders come on the scene—India and China, not least—who will be better prepared to assert their claim to a share of global resources. They will have noted too the ready ruthlessness with which the leading Western country—and various allies and clients—went to war to protect their interests.

21 It is difficult not to sigh for a ‘might have been’ and lament the judgment that led President Bush in the face of a gross violation of international law and the perceived threat to Western access to oil at reasonable prices to have precipitate recourse to military measures: he chose to send shortly after the invasion of Kuwait huge rather than token forces into Saudi Arabia; and once he had done that, he bad then in the face of problems of military logistics and morale little option except to use those forces in going to war. In consequence, an opportunity for making sanctions work that might have provided a most salutary contemporary precedent was lost, even if it is acknowledged that sanctions were likely to take a long time: and an opportunity was also missed for creating a new international atmosphere in which war options were taken up more slowly and more reluctantly than in the past. In short, President Bush not so much went to war too soon but with the connivance of his adversary, President Saddam Hussein, who refused to negotiate seriously in the days before the war began, he made war well‐nigh unavoidable too soon. Yet if President Bush failed to exhaust other reasonable means, particularly sanctions, before going to war, once the war had become inevitable or had actually got under way, those who needed to take a stand had then to do so in the light of the other moral and political considerations of the just war theory.

22 Gerard J. Hughes reflects carefully and critically on the arguments on different sides in the run‐up to the war in “Wise after the event”, The Tablet (25 May, 1991). During his discussion he suggests: ‘The role of the Churches, surely, is to raise rather than debase the standard of public discussion. There are several ways in which this might be done: by helping people not to confuse different kinds of issues; by trying to throw light on the problems of theology and moral theory which are involved: and by pressing politicians to provide honest information where such information is central to moral decisions. In all these areas we have much to learn.’

23 For some apt observations, see Arkin and others, op. cit., pp. 145–149.