Stephen Goss: When is bombing justified?

Dr Stephen Goss is a freelance historian, lectures in history and politics in London, and is a Conservative councillor in Reading.

According to the Just War Theory, the use of force must be for a morally defensible cause – typically self-defence or the protection of innocent life. It must be fought by legitimate authorities. It must be a last resort. Its expected benefits must outweigh the harm it causes. Combatants must distinguish between military targets and civilians, and the harm caused must be proportionate to the military objective being pursued.

Modern international law largely mirrors these principles. The Geneva Conventions and their additional protocols require armed forces to distinguish between non-combatants and combatants, to minimise civilian harm, and to avoid disproportionate attacks.

While the weight of benefits against harm caused is subjective, the ethical and legal standards for hostilities are not. A last resort; declared by legitimate authorities; proportionate; and directed at military targets – not civilians.

Last week we learnt that bombing is justified when Sinn Féin think it is. In an interview, Sinn Féin’s Matt Carthy TD insisted that ‘there isn’t an instance where bombing a country ended up resulting in a better situation’. This is blatantly not true. NATO’s intervention in the Balkans during the 1990s involved air strikes which halted ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo and contributed to establishing peace. The situation was complex, but the idea that military force can never produce a better outcome is simply not borne out by history.

Carthy’s comment might have passed unnoticed as a banal soundbite was it not for the fact that he represents a party whose political history is intertwined with one of the most sustained bombing campaigns ever conducted in Western Europe.

For the three decades of the Troubles, the Provisional IRA made bombing a central instrument of its strategy. Bombs were detonated across Northern Ireland and Great Britain in an attempt to exert pressure on the British state and advance the republican cause. The human cost was immense. Town centres were devastated. Civilians were killed and injured. On Bloody Friday in July 1972 the IRA detonated 22 bombs in bus and train stations, hotels, and shopping areas killing nine and seriously injuring 130 innocent people. On Remembrance Sunday in 1987 an IRA bomb at the War Memorial in Enniskillen killed 11 and injured 63. These are but two of many possible examples.

Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has complained that her party should not have to answer for the IRA as its violence is now in the past. Yet Sinn Féin has repeatedly refused to condemn the IRA’s campaign in unequivocal terms. Three current Sinn Féin members of the Northern Ireland Assembly have served prison sentences for bombing offences (Pat Sheehan, Gerry Kelly and Carál Ní Chuilín). Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill stated in a 2022 interview that there had been ‘no alternative’ to IRA violence. Last year former Sinn Féin MP Michelle Gildernew asserted that murder was justified during the Troubles.

Indeed, Carthy himself has paid tribute to Hunger Striker Kieran Doherty who was arrested while on a bombing mission. Carthy also defended Tommy McMahon canvassing for him. McMahon was the only person convicted for the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979. The bomb onboard Mountbatten’s fishing boat killed four, including two children.

Republican leaders argue that the IRA campaign, combined with Sinn Féin’s political strategy – the so-called ‘Armalite and ballot box’ approach – helped create the pressure that eventually led to negotiations and the Agreement in 1998.

If bombing can never produce a better situation, then the strategic logic behind the IRA’s campaign collapses. Either the campaign was both morally and strategically wrong, or Carthy’s statement is not a universal principle at all but a selectively applied one.

What makes Sinn Féin’s position all the more inconsistent is that the party regularly pronounces on international conflicts while failing to apply the same moral standards to its own past. Responding to the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, Ms McDonald demanded that the Irish Government condemn the action ‘without qualification’, declaring that the attacks were in breach of international law and warning they risked destabilising the region.

The principles Sinn Féin now invoke internationally: proportionality, restraint, and the protection of civilians sit uneasily alongside the record of the movement from which the party’s electoral strength emerged. The IRA campaign was built around bombing as a political instrument. Many attacks were directed not at military targets but at civilians. Measured against the standards Sinn Féin now demands others observe, many of those attacks would plainly fail.

As the situation in Iran and the wider Middle East has deteriorated, political leaders across the UK have been receiving security briefings on developments and their potential implications. These briefings are not academic exercises. They exist so that those responsible for governing can understand the risks, the intelligence picture, and the strategic choices moving forward. First Minister Michelle O’Neill has repeatedly refused to attend. For a party that frequently offers sweeping moral pronouncements about conflicts abroad: condemning Western military action, criticising NATO, and presenting itself as a voice for peace and international law, this is a notable decision.

It matters because serious discussion about the use of force requires more than rhetorical certainty. It requires an understanding of the intelligence, the risks, and the consequences that governments must weigh before acting. That is precisely why such briefings exist. Choosing not to attend them while simultaneously offering absolute judgements about the legitimacy of military action reinforces the Students’ Union-esque politics Sinn Féin prefers – debating international conflicts in the abstract rather than engaging with the difficult realities behind them.

That detachment from reality was illustrated by scenes in Belfast itself recently. Following the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, Iranians gathered in front of Belfast City Hall to celebrate. Men and women waved Iranian flags, cheered, and literally danced in the street. For them, the decapitation of a regime synonymous with brutal repression, imprisonment, and executions represented the possibility – however uncertain – of liberation. People who had actually lived under the Iranian regime were openly rejoicing at its seeming demise.

Sometimes military force is abused, mis-used, or disastrously misjudged. However, history also shows that it can halt aggression, stop atrocities, and bring down regimes that brutalise their own people. Just War theory does not claim that violence is never justified. On the contrary, it exists precisely because the use of force sometimes may be morally defensible. It places strict conditions on when and how it may be used.

Measured against those criteria, the IRA campaign was not justifiable. Many of its most notorious and deadly attacks were directed at civilians as the primary victims. The same ethical framework Sinn Féin now invokes to condemn the actions of others would render much of the IRA campaign indefensible. To claim that bombing can never produce a better situation is therefore not a serious moral position. Coming from a movement that once defended one of Europe’s most prolonged bombing campaigns, it is something else entirely: selective amnesia masquerading as principle.