This discussion came up in this thread – “Iraq and Vietnam” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=294790 – and in this one – “How far to the left is MoveOn, really?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=295366 – and I think it’s important enough to merit its own thread.
My thesis: By the generally accepted standards of the international community, the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq are not legitimate. The Iraqi insurgency against that occupation is legitimate.
True, the Coalition toppled a dictatorship and is trying to establish a democracy (kindsorta; I think the Iraqis will find their freedom to choose their own leaders will be severely limited if they should want to choose leaders who would repudiate contracts granted to foreign corporations since the invasion and kick Halliburton out of their oilfields). But what difference does that make? Ever since WWII, the international community has accepted the principle – such international peace as we have had has been based on the principle – that national sovereignty is a more important consideration than the value of any particular political or social system. I don’t have a cite for that, I don’t know if it’s embodied in the U.N. Charter or any other instrument of international law, but it’s something everybody just knows. I’m not entirely happy with it, as a rule of international relations – I’m an internationalist, I don’t even approve of national sovereignty as such – but there can be no question that it is a well-established, widely accepted rule. It was the principle of national sovereignty that Bush I invoked in the Gulf War. From the POV of the Kuwaiti people, democracy vs. despotism was not at issue; the only issue was whether they would be ruled by a Kuwaiti despot or a foreign one. But their country had been invaded by foreigners, and Bush was able to sell the international community on the idea that that alone justified intervention.
And by that standard, we have no more right to invade any despotism to give its people democracy than North Korea would have a right to invade South Korea to impose Communism. Unprovoked interference with another country’s sovereignty is generally held to be unacceptable except in very unusual and extreme circumstances, e.g., where foreign intervention is necessary to put a stop to genocide, as in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The Iraqi rebels, on the other hand, are fighting:
(1) An internal insurgency over what regime is to govern their own country. And that kind of struggle is always legitimate even though it is always, by definition, illegal. Most governments now existing, after all, had their origin in a revolution of one kind or another. (Including ours, of course. And Britain’s, whose present political system is rooted in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.)
(2) A national resistance aiming to drive out a foreign occupying power. That kind of struggle also has been viewed as legitimate, at least since WWII, which gave us the examples of the French. Poles, etc., fighting the German occupation of their countries, and the period immediately following, which gave us the examples of nationalist rebels fighting European colonial powers. Most nations now existing in Africa and Asia – and, for that matter, the Western Hemisphere – owe their independence to that kind of movement. How can anyone today deny, in principle, that such struggles are legitimate?
The insurgents’ terrorist tactics might be abhorrent and intolerable by any internationally accepted standards, but by those same standards, their cause is perfectly legitimate; and by those standards America’s occupation and “nation-building” program in Iraq is not a legitimate cause.
N.B.: The question of whether a given political cause is legitimate according to the usages of the international community has nothing to do with whether that cause is just or unjust, or whether its success would make things worse or better for the population concerned.