No, you don’t. Countries aren’t people. Non-American people deserve democracy, due process, and justice, just as Americans. These terms are defined within the structure of a single nation’s laws.
BTW, Iraqi citizens will never experience democracy, due process, and justice, unless the US effects regime change there.
My dear ** December**, first you make a bogus distinction between countries and people, of course you are dealing with people. Then you continue along that path with the strange assumption, that because you are not dealing with people, there is somehow no incentive to stick to the rules.
By analogy, are you saying that a company doesn’t have to follow any rules, in its dealings with other companies, because they are not people?
Sorry but you can’t wriggle out of it.
There are international rules, laws and treaties and the US has to adhere to them. Especially as the US is one of the prime instigators of most of those rules.
Which is why the United States continues to mire itself in Old World realpolitik. For all of France’s inconsistencies and flaws, I do believe that it is trying to use these concepts to define its foreign policy. France was punished much harder for the failure of collective security than the United States was in the past century, hence I do believe that its current intransigence is an attempt to institute a new model of foreign policy based on consensus rather than realpolitik.
This attempt is not credible in the United States due to its all-too-human failings, which Americans pick apart and analyze no differently than Cardinal Richelieu would.
Hence I believe that Iraq is just a proxy. Our decisions now will set the tone for relations among nations in the anarchic state system. We do have a chance now to recognize the bankruptcy of collective security and classical geopolitics, but in order to do this we must limit our own international reach in order to build consensus, and, more crucially, accept the fact that we must curtail our assertions of security. We need to live among our enemies.
Europe is ready for this. I fear that we are not.
Far be it from me to rush to december’s defense, I must point out that here you are in error. The distinction between countries and people cuts to the heart of classical international relations theory. This distinction has guided the interactions between states at least since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This paradigm is proving to be very difficult to abandon, as I discussed in my post just above.
I don’t think this is the time or the place to summarize the last four hundred years of geopolitics, but I could suggest a few books if you are interested.
That’s a mighty spectacular contortion of logic. What december actually said has no relation to the vile dribble you are spewing here.
Democracy doesn’t apply to businesses. Due process and justice do apply,* within the framework of some country’s laws.* Even contracts between companies in different countries often have provisions specifying which country’s law will govern them. Due process and justice don’t exist in a vacuum. They are enforced by the courts within some country.
Insisting on “due process, democracy and justice” for the Ba’ath regime could ironically prevent the people of Iraq from ever receiving “due process, democracy and justice.” Are you more concerned about some abstract principles than about the welfare of the Iraqi people?
On preview, thank you, Maglin
How about non-Americans who are at Guantanamo? Do they IYO deserve this things?
Absolutely. Justice for a POW is imprisonment under humane conditions until the war is over.
But they are not POW’s and what war?
I respectfully disagree with the idea that we should accede to the UN. If France and Germany et al had offered thoughtful and compelling reasons against instead of political posturing from the word Go, I might be more receptive to the idea. They do not speak for all of Europe, let alone the UN, and we should not be held entirely responsible for the divide that exists today. It was a very poor choice of issues with which to force a power play.
Compromise isn’t unthinkable but IMO on our side should include nothing less than regime change. We have far more compelling reasons to seek regime change than anyone else has to prevent it. Summed up in Scylla’s remark:
…and that’s the be-all and end-all of the thing. Saddam in a position of power will cost more lives with no foreseeable end. I “know” that SH is a primary source of training, funding, and arming the current crop of ME militant radicals just as others “know” GWB is a warmongering idiot with questionable morals. GWB’s mental capacity does not really address SH’s though, does it. We may not have hard evidence of an SH-al Qaida relationship, any more than we have between Columbian factions and the small-time dealer down the street, but a causative relationship and environment is certainly there. One will not exist without the other. Understandably, that is not by itself a compelling reason for invasion. Ok, we have more:
and there are even more probably…but these taken together spell death for a lot of people in and out of Iraq. More than a US invasion? I sincerely doubt it, and there is no political ideology attached to that view - it should not necessarily make me fuck, FUCK, FUCKing insane. It makes me a realist. I would like to see those real concerns addressed by France and company before I ascribe to them any kind of moral edge.
" For all of France’s inconsistencies and flaws, I do believe that it is trying to use these concepts to define its foreign policy. France was punished much harder for the failure of collective security than the United States was in the past century, hence I do believe that its current intransigence is an attempt to institute a new model of foreign policy based on consensus rather than realpolitik.
"
Actually, Maeglin, I disagree. I think that no nation, certainly no major player among nations, is innocent of realpolitik. But you are right to suggest that different historical circumstances determine a better or worse strategy for realpolitik. In a one superpower world where, simultaneously, trade and environmental issues (among others) necessarily occur on a global and transnational scale, and where a significant threat to world in the form of transnational and fundamentalist-based terrorism exists, international cooperation is absolutely required.
Bush-style realpolitik (exemplifed at its worst by Open-Wider-and-Switch-Feet Rumsfeld, is hopelessly screwed up b/c it is informed by a disdain of the diplomatic tools required for effective internationalism, a hidebound contempt for international institutions, and an embarassing arrogance and ignorance about European perspectives in particular. French realpolitik, while not necessarily more noble or less strategic, is simply more clued in to the reality of globalism in the twenty-first century. Hence, French tactics, supported by world opinion, are managing to hamstring the most powerful nation on earth.
I don’t precisely know what the immediate upshot will be; but insofar as the Bushies insist on the UN’s irrelevance and continue to pursue a unilateralist tack, they are simply demonstrating their own incompetence: if not in the short term, then certainly in the long term.
Ooops: last sentence of first paragraph: “significant threat to world peace”
Just to clarify, Mandelstam, I don’t actually believe that France is innocent of realpolitik, but is trying to change the model to incorporate 21st century globalism, just like you said. The French are certainly making calculations based on national interest, but perhaps less according to classical realpolitik doctrine.
Right you are Maeglin: the supposedly absolute divide in international relations between realism and idealism, or realpolitik and internationalism, is blurry and unmeaningful in the real world where material reality itself dictates the limits and the intertwining of these non-exclusive perspectives. Policy makers and academics may be able to maintain the distinction in their own writings but the world that we live in *now[i/] makes internationalism a necessary component of anyone’s realpolitik.
Actually Maeglin both you and December are wrong. Your pint of view could be true last century or perhaps even 50 years ago… not so today.
In traditional international law, the only subject was of course the state, and from that fact came all the difficulties that clearly still confuse our friend december: Is there an international law? if there is how it is enforced?, etc.
Later on a new subject of international law was added: international organazations, up to this point traditional authors could still argue that nothing really changed because, after all who creates them? (for those that are not following they are created by states).
Today a third subject is added to the this legal system, the individual. There are many conventions in which not only rights are granted to them but also ways top enforce it (you could check the American (I mean the contionent, not the country) comission of human rights or the american court of human rights. Now no one can argue that the individual is not a subject of international law. Therefore distinctions between international and national law are blurred, specially with the process of globalazation that caused a lot of countries to renounce to big portions of it’s sovereignity in favour of international law.
My pardons for my grammar, when I am excited I don’t preview.
So, Scylla
What your saying is that we let Saddam, whom you say is *** “is a bad bad guy, and getting rid of him will improve the the world”***, go about his merry way based on a diplomatic technicality?
Are we to let this guy get away with what he is doing to his people, to plan and impliment his plots to humiliate and hurt the US and try to achieve his dream of becoming the sole leader of the entire Islamic world just because the US was inept in their diplomatic effort?
Dems a very high stakes game youre playin…
I just had to comment on Mr. Friedman’s folly:
So we should go to the UN, and ask them to grant us a resolution that specifically authorizes military action if Iraq doesn’t comply with some set of to-be-determined conditions, by some to-be-determined date, is that it? But we tried to do that. Twice. We tried to get 1441 to include the phrase “all necessary means” to describe our reaction should Iraq fail to comply. No go. We tried to get those words into the current attempt at a resolution, to assert that Saddam had until the 17th to comply. That resolution is unlikely to pass. What makes Mr. Friedman think that if we tried it a third time, it would go any differently? Many nations, France in particular, simply do not care whether or not Saddam has WMDs enough to ever approve a war. Period. End of story.
And according to France, they’ll veto any further resolution that authorizes war. If they don’t, Russia likely will. So either we go to war without UN support (and here “UN support” really just means “France and Russia don’t veto”), or we don’t go to war. Those are our options. Given those, what do I choose? War. As much as I wish this could be done with as much support as possible, I think it’s important enough that how it’s done is secondary to that it is done. Delenda est Carthago, and all.
Jeff
Yes, the Bush administration has screwed up the diplomacy very badly. Mainly by sending troops before getting the required Security Council position. Knowing that Saddam would partially comply, once the troops were on Iraq’s borders, Bush should have realized this could split the Security Council. If the “Final” resolution 1441 had been passed before a single soldier was sent, Bush could have relied on Saddam to defy the Security Council over and over, increasing the wars’ legitimacy.
Of course, Bush may have actually done what I suggest, but he was stymied by the French last fall, in private negotiations.
Earlier on in this thread, I said:
In response to this The Coffeehood said:
This rule is contained in Article 42 of the UN Charter.
I heard tonight that, apparently, the UK Attorney General (the most senior lawyer in the UK) has told the PM that an attack on Iraq would be legal under article 42. So as far as the UK government is concerned, they don’t need UN sanction.
I think we need to jettison this growing urban myth that an attack on Iraq is in breach of international law. It’s not.