Just wars

This is off the top of my head. I have looked nothing up apart from reading the newspaper.

I read today that our Armed Forces Minister believes that we in Britain are 'growing so risk averse that the public may no longer tolerate deployment of the military.' The article about his speech last night rambles on and inevitably makes reference to Afghanistan. I think he misses the point. Whilst we honour the dead of Afghanistan as the bodies are brought home, it doesn't mean that we are happy with the war.

My own opinion is that we, the British people, do not think it is a 'just war.' If the Channel Islands were invaded by the French tomorrow, this nation would rise as one. (As if we needed any excuse to bash the French.) Protection of the Channel Islands would be a just war: fighting in Afghanistan is not.

All wars are just in the eye of the belligerent but that doesn't make them so. I'd say the basic qualification for the epithet 'just' in the eye of the defender is the liberation of one or more countries which have been peaceful but invaded by others. Yes the invaded countries may have been annoying but so long as they did not invade anyone, then you have no right to invade them. (Might make an exception here in the case of France but that is another matter.)

WWI and WWII seem to me to be just wars as was the Desert War which liberated Kuwait. I think the same about the Falklands even though Argentina may disagree. Tough, we didn't invite them and they were not welcome by the indigenous population.

But were Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, the wars of the Austrian and Spanish Succession just wars? I think not. They were/are simple interference in the affairs of others. And as I have said before, Afghanistan is sheer lunacy given the history of foreign intrusion into that country.

Then we get the middle ground like the War of American Independence and civil wars. Well, if you don't like your ruler, it seems OK to me to having a go at changing him. But the justness of such a war is in eyes of the local people not the rest of us.

Shouldn't really have started this subject for I have not really thought it through. However, I do not believe for one second that the British have lost their stomach for war overall. Back in pre-imperial Rome, according to Livy, people bemoaned the fact that the teenagers of the day were idle layabouts and would be useless in times of war. And then of course, they and their successors founded an empire.

No, Mr Armed Forces Minister, we are not interested because we don't care and don't feel that we or those we hold dear are threatened.

There you go, me musing again.