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Wars of Choice or Crime? The National Interest, State Crime and Official Overseas British Military Interventions Since 1945
Abstract
Since 1945 British governments, as a matter of official policy, have undertaken a number of military interventions against another sovereign state. Some interventions were justified on the grounds that they delivered United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCR) whether through another international organization such as the North atlantic Treaty Organisation (NaTO) or as a joint state activity. Others have been justified on humanitarian grounds or in terms of a regional or global responsibility to maintain peace and security. International law and international standards provide a framework for the legitimacy or otherwise of any intervention by one sovereign state in the affairs of another sovereign state; to act in breach of them would be a state crime. as a liberal democratic country the United Kingdom (UK) would not be expected so to act.
On the other hand, successive UK governments have emphasized the role of the national interest as a major official criterion for intervention, in part where authorization has been, or claimed to have been, provided by a UNSCR or, increasingly, where the UK intervenes without such an authorization.
This article asks if the formal reasons for any of the interventions give grounds for questioning their legality under international law and why a liberal democratic state may pursue an approach amounting to state crime. It concludes by suggesting that a liberal democratic state such as the UK has both the capacity and motivation for state crime at international level and, while the opportunities for so acting may be limited, the pursuit of the national interest is an ever-present potential for initiating or engaging in interventions whose justification under international law or other international standards may be tenuous at best or illegal at worst.
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Ministers are in any case bound by a ministerial code which requires a duty to comply with the law, including international law and treaty obligations.
Under the UN Charter non-violent measures may be taken to address what the Charter calls “any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression”. If these fail to work, the UN may authorize under Article 42 “such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security”.
Any military intervention by one sovereign state against another would be governed by IHL; equally importantly, if the basis for the intervention changes so that the basis on which the initiator continues that intervention would also be governed by IHL. IHL is an assemblage of international conventions which cover an extensive range of issues from combat operations to treatment of citizens.
Essentially the government's argument was that failure to comply with the Resolution requiring “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations” activated previous Resolutions relating to the ending of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait; in other words, military action was suspended rather than ended, and any conduct by Iraq jeopardizing the ceasefire, including non-compliance over the destruction of WMD, allowed any state to act to “restore international peace and security in the area”, only telling the Security Council of what they decided to do.
For similar reasons it has been argued that “the abuse of human rights has been consistently treated less seriously when perpetrated by a major state with oil, markets for British exports or other forms of economic muscle. In particular, when these considerations are reinforced by the export needs of the British arms industry, human rights have always taken a back seat” (Self 2010: 224).