ABSTRACT
Ethical criticism of the 1940-45 Bomber Command campaign against German cities had been voiced in the UK even during the war, but official and other histories revived argument, and this helped to renew awareness of just war concepts. In the years following the Suez fiasco, UK forces were continually drawn into operations of various kinds, but there was no clear-cut war until the recovery of the Falkland Islands in 1982. After the Kosovo operation, the next UK-involving event classifiable as a war was the US-dominated action in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 to extirpate alQa'ida and unseat the Taleban regime that had partnered it by shelter and support. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that a determined group at and near the centre of the US Administration saw the war as fulfilling their ambition to begin remoulding the Middle East into a political form better suiting their perception of US and global interests.
