Arguing About War Michael Walzer Yale University Press, 208pp, £16.99 ISBN 0300103654 War Is a Racket General Smedley D Butler Feral House, 80pp, £6.99

Any thinking member of the military will question the morality of war. The state authorises soldiers to go to other lands and kill people. Some of those killed will be innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, or classified as unavoidable "collateral damage". Finding a way through the moral and ethical arguments has never been more challenging than it is today, as we hear British politicians arguing that the 10,000 civilian Iraqis dead from our latest intervention are in some way acceptable in the light of Saddam Hussein's much greater atrocities.

I first read Michael Walzer 20 years ago, after finishing a tour commanding a Vulcan nuclear bomber squadron. If World War III had started, I and my squadron would have been flying east to destroy millions of our fellow human beings with bombs far more powerful than the one used on Hiroshima. Spending the following year at Cambridge reflecting on deterrence theory, I found Walzer's seminal work Just and Unjust Wars invaluable. He examined the moral dilemma that nuclear deterrence posed: if the mutual threat of an immoral act - the killing of millions - prevented a war between two nuclear powers, could it then be moral? I took comfort in his conclusion that "we threaten evil in order not to do it, and the doing of it would be so terrible that the threat seems in comparison to be morally defensible".

Whether nuclear deterrence was morally correct or not, the world survived the cold war, and the role of the military has become still more complex. So it was with some interest that I looked to see what Walzer would make of the quarter-century of conflicts that had passed since. Unfortunately, Arguing About War is not a straight update of his previous volume. It is an edited collection of magazine articles he has written in the intervening years. The book may be ordered logically by subject, but successive chapters skip back and forth across different years and wars. That it hangs together reasonably well is to the credit of Walzer's consistency of argument, but readers might have found it more enjoyable to have a constant perspective from the present.

Since the end of the cold war, the international community has faced many challenges. Walzer traces the development of his thinking about intervention and just-war theory. He explains that the term "just" means no more than justifiable, defensible or, perhaps, morally necessary given the alternatives. The fight against Nazism provides the easiest example of a just war. The aims of modern interventions are more complex. For a war to be just, there must be a legitimate reason for action. In humanitarian operations, how much suffering provides a sufficient rationale?

Just-war theory has conventionally divided into two parts: the decision to go to war (jus ad bellum); and the conduct of war itself (jus in bello). Walzer proposes a third consideration, jus post bellum, which he defines as justice after the war. He also highlights how the strategic need for moral conduct of war has become much better understood. The US lost the Vietnam war because it failed to win the battle for hearts and minds, both at home and in the theatre of operations. A moral approach to warfare is now necessary if a country is to achieve its long-term aims.

The first major intervention of the post-cold war period was designed to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, which had been invaded in August 1990. Walzer, writing immediately after the operation, asks how well it stood up to classical just-war theory. He discusses the alternatives to war, including economic sanctions, blockades, diplomatic action and negotiated settlement. Politicians like to talk of war as the last resort; but in reality the lesser options can be spun out endlessly without conclusive failure. Walzer argues persuasively that the diplomatic options had to be backed by a credible threat of force against a fixed deadline. When that deadline expired, on 15 January 1991, war was a legitimate rather than a last resort.

Just-war theory also requires that war be a proportionate response to a situation. Was Kuwait's independence worth the deaths that would follow a military intervention? Making this assessment is particularly difficult. If there had been a risk of starting a nuclear war by going to Kuwait's rescue, then few would have thought it worth defending. New weapon systems reduced the risks of unnecessary deaths on all sides. Not to have taken on Saddam Hussein would have encouraged him to further adventures in the region. The 1991 Gulf war passed these tests. A just war seeks only to restore things to the state they were in before the act of aggression. Again, the limited aim of expelling Iraqi forces from Kuwait was sustained. A further push to Baghdad, which some commentators now argue should have been attemp-ted, would have turned a just war into an act of aggression.

Twelve years later, the United Nations came to a different conclusion about an intervention over Saddam Hussein's bad behaviour. Writing in late 2002, Walzer analyses the information available at the time, and concludes reasonably that the conditions for a just-war intervention in Iraq did not exist. His article is entitled "Inspectors yes, war no". He accepts that the moral distinction between preventive and pre-emptive war may have narrowed in the era of weapons of mass destruction. Yet this, in his view, strengthens the case for continuing inspections. He dismisses the thought that regime change can be a justification for war, particularly given the historical precedents. By early 2003, he is advising anti-war supporters to argue that containment of Saddam remains a better course than war.

When the conflict in Iraq gets under way, Walzer condemns both Saddam Hussein and George W Bush for fighting unjust wars. Saddam has forfeited the right to defend his regime because he has no moral legitimacy; America's war is unjust because there were alternatives to war that could have achieved disarmament at lower cost. However, once the war has started, justice in the conduct of the war becomes the main concern. The requirement of jus post bellum, or a just peace after the conflict, must also be met. The Pentagon, Walzer argues, would have done better to think about this at an early stage of planning.

Another American, in another age, also disagreed with his government's policies about war. Major General Smedley D Butler was a much-decorated marine officer, whose 1930s writings are reproduced in a slim volume, War Is a Racket. He was decorated for interventions in China, Nicaragua, Cuba and Haiti; and then nearly court-martialled for making offensive remarks about Benito Mussolini. After retirement, he accused the US of conducting wars to support big business. He led a march of First World War veterans on Washington, DC during the Depression; and he is credited with exposing a fascist plot for a coup against President Franklin D Roosevelt. He came to believe that the US should stay out of all foreign wars, and that there should be a constitutional amendment to prevent the military from operating overseas. He died just before Pearl Harbor might have made him revise his isolationist views. Yet his book reminds us that armed forces do think about what they are asked to do - sometimes, perhaps, more deeply than the politicians who do the asking.

Tim Garden, a former air marshal, is now a Liberal Democrat peer

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