They have carved out pieces of already recognized states. You don’t get to just take over territory from an established state and declare yourself a new state. And, they don’t have fixed borders that they control. The territory is not contiguous-- it’s bits and pieces here and there. And, there is no consent of the governed-- this is a bunch of bandits trying to seize territory governed by internationally recognized states.
The had contiguous territory and the consent of the governed. It’s debatable as to whether individual states were obliged to stay in the union.
The areas controlled by the so-called Islamic State did not vote to secede. They were taken by force by a non-state actor.
I think I disagree with you. If you’re saying that “we did X against AQ, therefore doing X against ISIL is okay because AQ and ISIL are sort of alike in this list of respects,” I don’t agree. We have to take the specifics of each case and apply the law to it. To give just one example, the US is acting in its own self-defense with respect to AQ. But against ISIL, we are acting in collective self-defense of Iraq and other countries. One can imagine that if we found some ISIL guys floating on an iceberg in the North Atlantic, the US may not have a strong claim to attack them because they wouldn’t seem to be a threat to Iraq, Turkey or Jordan; but if they were AQ guys floating toward Maine, the rules may be different.
I appreciate the thought you put into these statements, but you just totally lost me.
I wrote that statement to acknowledge the fact that any war is comprised of many, many thousands of individual actions, and it is not reasonable to expect that every single one will meet the measure of legal or moral justification despite the best efforts of a country to do so. Misjudgments will occur that result in people who were killed for no reason, and some people may simply commit war crimes against the orders of their leaders. To use one example, the fact that several US servicemen urinated on dead Taliban fighters in contravention of the Geneva Conventions does not, by itself, lead to the conclusion that the whole war in Afghanistan is immoral and illegal. Contrast that to the actions of ISIL, where we can see from a strategic level that their whole campaign is predicated on illegal and immoral violence, and we can easily conclude that there is no justification for anything that they are doing.
