Although the desire for military action against Syria has been set aside in favour of negotiations, it remains on the table. War has always had its own brutal logic. As the Athenian ambassadors said to the islanders of Melos to whom they offered the alternative of subjugation or death, 'We shall not trouble you with specious justifications; and in return we hope that you will aim at what is feasible, since you know as well as we do that what is right is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.'
The Melians put a high value on their freedom and were slaughtered.
In western democracies such honesty is rare. Military action is normally sprinkled with justifications after it is a done deal. The other Athenian tradition of ethical reflection receives only lip service.
So it is important for citizens to ponder seriously whether the wars their leaders propose are just. There are questions for that. Even though they were formulated in a time when nations declared war on one another and soldiers marched to fight them, they remain pertinent.
Military adventures now resemble gunboat diplomacy more than war. Strong outside powers launch military assaults to secure their interests or to punish wrong suffered, often trying to influence conflicts within the targeted country. Restricted in their scope they are like policing actions
Nevertheless, the questions traditionally asked about the justice of wars give us a useful fix on the proposed Syrian intervention. The normal things that reflection on just war demand be established are that military action is for a just cause and is carried out primarily with that intention, that it is a last resort, that the harm done is outweighed by the good achieved, that its success can be reasonably predicted and that it is properly authorised. For military action to be justified all these conditions must be realised.
The standard examples of just causes given for war are self defence and the patent threat of an imminent attack. For limited military action, however, there may be other just causes. Those used to justify action in Syria have included support for factions opposed to President Assad, punishment for using poison gas against civilians, the need to destroy Syria's reserves of poison gas, and sending a message to Iran in its proxy war in Syria. Central to the right intention is that