Sorry, there was a cut-off of the beginning of my post. I was replying to Tigers2B1.
When you say “prefer”, are you talking about personal desires, or policy ones?
Because while, for humanitarian reasons, I’m glad they are being liberated, I’m not sure it’s in the national interest to do so (or more generally, that the benefits to the US interest in conducting this war outweigh the harm to the US interest.)
So does it matter to the Prowar folks that this war is illegal?
Not really. Say there’s a raving lunatic serial-killing mass-murderer on the loose, and an angry mob tars and feathers and lynches him/ her. If it turns out that in fact the angry mob got the right person, and the townsfolk are all happy to be rid of the raving lunatic serial-killing mass-murderer, that still doesn’t mean that lynch mobs are the right way to do things, either in my contrived hypothetical situation, or in general.
No.
I was unaware that there was an international governing body. Guess those Michigan Militia folk were right after all.
I’m talking about personal desires.
As for “national interest,” so what? Isn’t the reason that Kissinger is reviled by the American Left is because he believed in realpolitik, that the only good of an action/policy is its benefit to US interests? That the issues of morality and humanitarianism were irrelevant?
[rant] When did the Democratic Party and the American Left decide to give the moral highground to Bush and the GOP? When did the idealists decide that every act should be weighed in the grubby calculus of whether it benefits us or not?[/rant]
Sua
So international law can be bent by the people with the weapons?
The reason that Iraq was attacked in the 1991 gulf war was because saddam illegally attacked Kuwait, in absolute theory, the US could be attacked by an international coalition for severely braking international law.
Cite, please.
Sua
The reason the “debating society” was unable to get off its butt was because one member had decided that, no matter what, it was going to veto anything the United States proposed.
No, the reason that Iraq was attacked in 1991 was because Saddam attacked Kuwait. Legality had nothing to do with it. If France had vetoed the UN resolution authorizing use of force in 1991, the US and allies still would have liberated the country.
Hrmmm? Wouldn’t the international coalition require approval by the UN Security Council before attacking the US? And, presuming that the US would veto such a resolution, wouldn’t any attack be a severe violation of “international law”?
So, under no theory could an international coalition legally attack the US.
I’m shocked that you would so gleefully advocated such blatant disregard for international law.
Sua
Unlike Izzy, I believe life is bad enough under Saddam that a majority of Iraqis would be glad to be rescued from him by anyone from the Saudis to the Martians.
I’m glad the people of Iraq will soon be free of Saddam, if they aren’t already. But this is a side-effect of our invasion, not its purpose - just the way liberating the Afghanis from the Taliban wasn’t the point of our Afghanistan adventure. And five years from now, if a group just as bad as the Taliban is running Afghanistan, this administration won’t care, and if a dictator just as bad as Saddam is running Iraq, this administration won’t care, as long as neither one’s harboring terrorist networks, possessing nukes or bio/chem weapons, or interfering with the oil supply to the West.
I’m all for liberating people from under the bootheels of evil regimes. And I think we could have gotten substantial support in the Security Council for some organized program under which we, in conjunction with the UN, set out some standards for how bad such a regime had to be to warrant direct military intervention to remove such a regime (China might’ve gotten a bit nervous, of course, but we could have probably conveniently defined them out of eligibility), gone about identifying and grading the worst ones to see who we should toss out first, and then gone in and done it.
And if we couldn’t do it through the UN, we could have tried doing it through NATO, which was how we did our Balkan interventions. And if NATO wouldn’t go along, we could have done something like this on our own. But did we do anything like that? Nope.
But just invading Iraq on our own, rather than trying to set up a new paradigm to say when it’s OK to intervene to rescue an oppressed people from their own leaders, says that we’re beyond any rules, even our own. What we have effectively said in the case of Iraq is that we can do whatever we want in the world, because we’re the biggest dog on the block; just try to stop us.
Whenever the big dog does whatever it wants because it’s the biggest dog around, the moment things go wrong and it needs friends, it has none. If a year from now, Shi’ites are fighting Sunnis who are fighting Kurds, and we’re trying to keep them from killing each other while trying to extract ourselves so we can deal with Iran or North Korea or some entirely new threat, we won’t be able to expect much help. We will have little flexibility to deal with new threats since we’ll be tied up in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans. And while our military is amazingly good, it can’t be everywhere at once.
Meanwhile, there’s the threats we’re not dealing with right now because we’re in Iraq. In particular, there’s the threat of nuclear proliferation, as Tom Lehrer’s song “Who’s Next?” finally seems to be coming to life. North Korea and Iran are turning into nuclear powers as we watch. Do we know how many countries are a few years away from doing the same? Clearly if countries such as these (and Pakistan, and Iraq if nobody’d interfered) can go nuclear, so can a lot of other countries: you don’t have to be one of the world’s technological elite to become a nuclear power anymore.
The more countries there are with nuclear weapons, the more likely that they’ll be used. Instead of Iraq (which doesn’t seem to be within years of having nukes), we should be concentrating on how to restrict nukes to the few countries that already have them (excepting North Korea if they’re already there) and trying to move the international community towards some sort of framework to restrict nukes, that would set out rules for when forcible intervention was appropriate to prevent the spread of nukes.
My fear is that while we’re bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan over the coming years, we’ll find ourselves in a world with ten, twelve, fifteen nuclear powers, and the genie will be out of the bottle. Even the U.S.A. can only do so many things at once, and what we’re doing in Iraq has to be balanced against what other use we might make of our power and influence.
I am not exactly antiwar. But the reason for the top priority of this war has never been adequately explained to me, and still makes no sense to me. And that being the case, I’m against it. Liberating a bunch of people from Saddam right now won’t be that great a bargain if another large bunch of people gets nuked a few years down the road because we were too busy to stop the spread of such weapons. And Saddam could have kept for a year or two; the nuclear thing really can’t, as two dangerous nations are already on the cusp there.
Under international law there are only two legal ways in which sates can use military force:
1- They can claim article 51 of the UN charter which refers to self defense, but international law has shown that one cannot claim self-defense on a preemptive strike unless the danger is immediate and overwhelming.
2- The UN security council can authorize the us of force, which has not been done.
here is a link on an interview with an international law expert
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/s807386.htm
This is not entirely on topic since it concerns the perceptions of Arabs and Muslims outside of Iraq. But it does support my point about the large and (in my view) unncessary costs of having proceeded to liberate–if liberation is what it ends up being–in this fashion.
Some excerpts from this article.
“Thousands of protesters spilled onto the streets of Arab capitals after Muslim Friday prayers at which preachers across the Middle East condemned the United States for attacking Iraq.”
“In Cairo, the biggest city in the Arab world with almost 17 million people, at least 5,000 angry protesters clashed with police using water cannon outside the historic al-Azhar mosque.”
"In Jordan, thousands of protesters fought baton-wielding riot police after the authorities sealed off parts of the capital, Amman, to foil Islamist organized pro-Iraq protests.
Scores of young people were injured and several arrested as police used tear gas to disperse worshippers in the city’s Wihdat area, a predominately Palestinian refugee neighborhood."
Note that since Saddam’s is a mainly secular regime, there is no natural alliance between his policies and the people who are now up in arms about American aggression.
Kuwait was the only exception cited in the article.
SUA:
What I meant by absolute theory is just that “ABSOLUTE” theory, of course this is impossible in practice because of the veto vote,
but remember that not only France was against the war, so was China and Russia, even without a veto vote on the part of France, It is unlikely the US would have gotten majority in the council
If the general consensus of the Iraqi people was “I’m glad you bombed the fuck out of our country. It was worth it to get rid of Saddam. The puppet government you’ve set up for us in the name or our freedom is much better.”
Then I might feel a little better about the whole deal.
Still, I don’t think the majority of Iraqis want us in there at the moment, and it sets a bad precedent in terms of foreign policy.
Lets put this in the proper context:
Does it matter to the pro-war people that a war to liberate an oppressed people from a dangerous despot is illegal?
…I would say …nope, dont matter to me. :rolleyes:
Of course I was exaggerating by saying that the US could be attacked by an international coalition, but what could actually happen is that a country that is not afraid to ruin it’s relations with the US, such as Iran, could file an application before the International Court of Justice against the US for it’s illegal use of force.
FTR, I agree with Tomcat. If those most affected are joyous that the regime is threatened with destruction, that weighs heavily in determining after the fact whether the war was just.
Mandelstam A protest of 5,000 in a city of 17,000,000 is not likely reflective of general sentiment. I think the majority are watching it unfold like we all are, waiting to judge what actually happens.
I am thrilled for those people who feel liberated and free where they did not before. That does not make our actions right for me. If it does for you, please tell me which country you feel should be liberated next. No, I mean it, this is not rhetorical. In all sincerity, since this justifies our actions, which people will we liberate next? Surely you don’t contend that there are no other repressed and brutalized people in the world.
I am also mindful of the stories, depicted in Ambrose’s books and the Band of Brothers series, of those women in countries in Europe who would fuck the German soldiers when they were in town, and turn around and fuck the American soldiers when they moved through. Some people will always “suck up” so to speak.
Will it matter to prowar folks if terrorists, incited by the US behavior in this war, strike out against Americans or Brits?
Will it matter to prowar folks if innocent Iraqi civilians are killed in this war?
Will it matter to prowar folks if the US is isolated by the rest of the world community unable to build alliances in the future because of our current behavior?
Will it matter to prowar folks if Pakistan, for example, strikes preemptively at India, using the new US policy as a model?
Will it matter to prowar folks if the UN security council loses all credibility because the US decided to ignore its most essential function?
I hope that prowar folks will answer all these question in the same way that I answer the titular question: of course.
Daniel