The cause of the Syrian people continues to excite foreign policy commentators in the UK. One offering in the last few days was this article on the Huffington Post by Luke Bozier. Others have taken to twitter to denounce compliance with international law as an “excuse for idiocy” and ruminated extensively on the veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council (P-5). Mr Bozier and Mr Green are both commentators of some standing, and Mr Green’s professional qualifications are certainly not in doubt. However, I believe both of them profess dangerous sentiments with regards to Syria, and international law more widely, respectively. 

With regards to Mr Bozier, the proposition that the West should pump arms, training and money into Syria to “create a boiling point” may seem palatable - it would place no British lives in danger and would enable the rebel movement within the country to take on the Syrian military on more even terms. Yet it is a short-term solution and a long-term nightmare. The weapons we ship to Syria do not contain moral compasses; the people wielding them do not have the same outlook as we do, nor are they likely to always align with our preferred outcome for Syria. In the absence of the crushing weight of the Assad regime, what is to ensure that these weapons do not point at each other? Syria is an ethnically and religiously heterogeneous place - from what I can tell, there isn’t a united opposition, never mind a united vision for the post-war Syria. 

The risk is that, in our haste to be rid of one nightmare, we build up for a second. Assad is clearly a dangerous leader - but in the muddle of a civil war after he is either exiled or tortured to death, who is in the wrong and who is in the right? The presumption of the interventionists that there are clear moral answers in foreign policy belies the ugly truth - that it is only very rarely that we can have easy moral choices in a plural world. It is naive to suggest that this boiling point will remove Assad without even hinting at what would come after. I am of the opinion that we must countenance no such measures until we have a peacekeeping force in the tens of thousands and billions of dollars of reconstruction aid ready for insertion to help the rebuilding process. Mr Bozier makes no such allowances for post-war scenarios - the allusion to Iraq is almost too easy to make.

Mr Bozier also suggests we do not need Security Council resolutions to make war on Syria. The UN Charter, the cornerstone of international law, would disagree - making it clear that the “threat or use of force” by states is illegal. Only two exceptions are granted by the Charter - Article 51, which covers the long-standing right to self-defence, and Article 42, which grants the Security Council the right to authorise the use of force. The Charter is designed to make it hard to get an authorisation to use force; a system to prevent a repeat of that greatest of horrors, war between the great powers.

There is not much room here to wiggle - international law is clear. It is not a matter of nibbling at the phrase “any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations” in 2(4) - who decides when something is inconsistent, and if it is sufficiently so to warrant the use of force? Arguably, the Security Council, which the member states have after all invested with “primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security”. It is not a matter of banging the drum of Responsibility to Protect - which in any case relies on the Security Council to provide the authorisation to use force. The ICISS is very clear; failure to seek this will undermine the credibility of the UN system itself.

Thus I am mystified as to why compliance with international law is such a bad thing. Does Mr Green prefer it if states were to interact in an unregulated way - stripped of the apparently burdensome constraints of international law? We can do away with 2(4) if he wishes and see if states use their new freedom to use force for the greater good; or if practical political concerns, or aged nationalist sentiments, help shape a rather less salubrious world. Louis Henkin once remarked that the great truth of international law was that most states obeyed most of it most of the time. We should not abandon it because of a singular incident, however painful it has been for those involved. Nor should we dismiss international law because it does not do as we intend today.

We must recognise that the jus ad bellum of today is designed to make it harder to go to war. Advocates of intervention in Syria would win my support more readily if they admitted that this is what they are advocating - war. That aside, they should neither be mystified nor angered that the legal process makes it hard to rush for the JDAMs. They would also win my support more readily if they had a plan for post-war Syria - a recognition that a vacuum must be filled (with boots on the ground and money from our pockets) and that a regime must be established in its place. I am concerned that we are so eager for war against Assad that we will throw aside much greater concerns - such as laws against war - to remove one madman. In the aftermath of Intervention 2.0, there may be a rather more deadly world awaiting us - and that is a price none of us will be willing to pay.