The Iraq War was Justified!

1. It is worth noting that one of the most crucial distinctions between Rwanda and Iraq is the general absence in the latter case of UN personnel. What is in question for me is not only or not so much whether international law might grant to the UN the power to act, but whether it confers on the US the ability to unilaterally declare the Iraqi government a threat and deploy under its own name thousands of soldiers. Recall that the US neither sought UN approval nor heeded subsequent condemnations of the invasion. This implies that any claimable authority originating in the Genocide Conventions and the UN charter was squandered by US obstinacy. Pro often insists I accept the framework of international law (odd though I think it is to hold as the paradigm the disquieting example of the Nuremberg trials), but, while I have granted it tentative legitimacy for the sake of argument, it is actually the US who appears, by its actions, not to accept its authority. 2. I am not merely speaking of hypocrisy. There are two separate levels of argument: first, though he suggests I ignore it, I allude in R3 to the requirement in Just War Theory of right authority (contrary to Pro’s suggestion, JWT requires that all of its criteria must be met, not “any of those justifications”). As I have indicated above, both in this round and in others, it is difficult to see how the US had any legal authority under international law to act. All of the documents cited by Pro and I in this debate clearly confer discretionary authority on competent organs of the UN, the Security Council in particular. If anyone should have pursued just military intervention, it is this right authority. Nevertheless, I think Pro has also glossed over the case against the US’s moral authority to act. Pro indicates that the US, by invading Iraq, is merely honoring its historical commitment to ensure that “never again” will genocides on the scale of the Holocaust occur. My counterargument is more than a suggestion of hypocrisy—I argue outright that the US’s selectivity in pursuing this commitment’s realization, and the egregious instances of contradiction (like Guatemala, Iran-Contra, and treatment of native tribes), make it clear that its humanitarianism is mediated—clouded, perhaps—by national interest, something which can never be just cause in the context of JWT (which context, despite the absence in earlier times, according to Pro, of cohesive international law, has been written on by scholars for well over a millennium). Pro’s only counterargument has been the unsupported intimation of a “backdoor” or an “exception” for individual parties. Apart from the fact that such a loophole has only been alluded to, rather than explicitly cited, we may also take the US’s complete failure to persistently solicit UN approval for the invasion as an indication that not every alternative was exhausted, implying that, even if this loophole could be proven to exist, the US could not invoke it here. The second layer of argument concerns the consensual nature of law, which argument Pro, apart from repeating his insistence that each party has consented (“the documents notes [sic] that they… were never coerced into signing”), leaves unaddressed. To avoid wasting space by rehashing my argument, I suggest only that you see the first paragraph of C1 in R3. I will say I bring up examples of US conduct to call into question whether consent is really sufficient to legitimate law given the manner of its application. 3. Speaking more about civilian casualties and US conduct in the war in the context of jus in bello, I think Pro’s argument is misleading. Even if we grant that there is nothing so criminal during a campaign about one civilian casualty, I want to make clear that we are not talking about one civilian casualty, or a hundred, or a thousand (this latter number, mind you, being the threshold, according to the Correlates of War, to declare an intrastate conflict a civil war)—we’re talking, according to the estimates I linked in R2 [http://en.wikipedia.org...], about well over 100,000. Given that the death toll in the Rwandan Genocide is estimated to be over 500,000, the argument from military necessity is, at best, highly dubious. If we accept such an argument, the further question is raised of how many such casualties may be justified before necessity is really just recklessness and negligence (assuming minimal overt malevolence). Moreover, we are not speaking only of civilian deaths: as I suggest at the end of R3 and elsewhere, with multiple citations, we’re also looking at damage to nutrition, infrastructure, the environment, mass displacement, and rampant human rights violations (many instances of which, like “enhanced interrogation” in Guantanamo, are still operational and immune to prosecution, not to mention the high-ranking officials who were never prosecuted for the orders they gave or their knowing complicity in these same offenses, and others of which were defended by long-standing statutory immunity in Iraqi courts, as I indicated and sourced in R3 when discussing exceptionalism). Frankly, even if you reject every other argument I’ve made against justification for invasion (and, specifically, for US authority to invade unilaterally), it is undeniable that the manner in which the Iraq War was actually conducted is unquestionably unjustifiable. To recite and conclude, my case is this: The law really has no authority here, and there is nothing like legitimacy that could be conferred on it, including, considering the law’s actual operation, by consent. Even if it has authority, I offer an explicit, thoroughly-sourced legal argument demonstrating that the US had no legal authority (and a historical argument likewise impugning its moral authority) to act. Yet, even supposing there was some statutory exception, any initial justification was irremediably wasted by the US’s horrendous and documented botching of the campaign. Good debate.