The Iraq War was Justified!

Concerning history, my contention was not with the use of historical examples, but with selection bias. The examples given are selected in such a way that they omit the UN's history of failed invasions--Somalia, Bosnia, and, though Pro seems to suggest in R2 that we stayed out, Rwanda. Thomas Jacobson's analysis of UN peacekeeping missions [http://www.idppcenter.com...] suggests not merely that the US-led UN attempted to keep the peace between Tutsi and Hutu, but that, when total civil war did break out, peacekeepers were unquestionably ineffective. Often, Jacobson notes, peacekeepers tend to retreat in the face of open conflict, even when this means leaving unattended the civilians they were deployed to protect. Legality I want first to make clear that I am not suggesting international law to be in its own right coercion of the weak by the strong—my argument is that its enforcement, as evidenced by its historically-inconsistent application to its signers, is informed more by geopolitical considerations than by legal impartiality. It is little wonder that the UN has not behaved in similar fashion toward the US as toward Iraq for its history of human rights abuse and wanton skirting of agreed-upon wartime conventions, including in the course of the Iraq War, since, for over twenty years, the US has provided 25%--several hundred million dollars—of the UN’s yearly budget [http://www.fas.org...]. The next closest contributor is Japan, whose 2010 contribution was less than half of the US’s ($264.9 million vs $532.4 million). The moral authority of international law rightly comes under serious scrutiny when its application in matters of crimes against humanity is heavily mediated by the financial and political influence of its most powerful members. The fact that the UN, as Pro acknowledges in R2, more or less stood by, offering only meek condemnations, when the US set to its invasion without soliciting formal international approval. This is why I submit that, if in fact consent to the same statutes produces radically different legal outcomes such that concurrent with consent is de facto immunity based on power, I am skeptical that the law is really legitimated in this way. To be clear, there are two levels of argumentation on my side: in criticizing first the authority of law, I am not arguing that the Iraq War was unjustified: I am arguing that the lack of a fundamental legitimation of law nullifies the dichotomy between justified and unjustified—that is, that the Iraq War is neither justified nor unjustified, because there is really nothing like justification that could be conferred on it. The second level of argumentation takes this framework for granted, arguing that, even should you accept it, there are several ways of calling the war unjustified, including US authority to conduct the war, the US’s criminal conduct in the war, the premises on which the public was led to support it, etc. As a brief digression concerning my use of the native displacement example, I think the context is wholly applicable, not because the legal standards were identical—naturally, they weren’t—but because the underlying principle of legal authority, whether in the case of westward expansion or the Iraq campaign, is sovereign exceptionalism. It is on this basis of this exceptionalism that the US was able to claim the right to displace and slaughter the native populations, and the prerogative to invade Iraq without either a clear defensive motivation (indeed, it is touted by Pro as a proactive humanitarian intervention) or substantive international consultation. In fact, one of the reasons that the US decided to withdraw most of its combat forces from Iraq is less a matter of a successful campaign and more one of the refusal to continue formal recognition of US exceptionalism in the form of statutory immunity in Iraqi courts [http://www.npr.org...][ http://www.huffingtonpost.com...]. C2 I think there is some understandable semantic confusion concerning use of the word “may” in the UN charter—specifically, in Articles 41 and 42. The sense I see Pro giving it is the same as “I may do X, I may not”; however, given the constitutional nature of the Charter, my understanding is the same as telling a student he may use the bathroom—the Articles are in question are delimiting the UN’s authority to act, rather than signifying that the UN might or might not behave a particular way. In any case, I find this line of argument peculiar, because Pro’s stance on legality in his opening arguments was praising the US for upholding international law, but, in fact, acting unilaterally, they were skirting the statutes to which they had agreed. Setting aside all the “may” language, consider the definiteness of Article 39, which specifies that “The Security Council shall determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.” Whatever backdoors Pro suggests exist, this article makes it clear that any measures pursuant to rectifying a breach of the peace, which breach is to be determined, for international law, by the Security Council, must be sought through the UN, and, for matters of military force, Article 46 explicitly specifies that “Plans for the application of armed force shall be made by the Security Council with the assistance of the Military Staff Committee.” And, barring cases of self-defense, in which individual states retain independent discretion (Article 51), Section 2 of Article 48 states, “Such decisions [of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security (48.1)] shall be carried out by the Members of the United Nations directly and through their action in the appropriate international agencies of which they are members.” Further, in the Genocide conventions (all of these documents having been linked in R2), any dispute concerning application of the agreed-upon statutes, “including those relating to the responsibility of a State for genocide”, can be referred either to competent organs of the UN (Article 8), who may act under the authority just discussed under the UN Charter, or, at the request of one of the disputants, to the International Court of Justice (Article 9). I see no room in “effective penalties”, either in the conventions or the charter, for unilateral initiation of military force. C3: US on Trial While Pro suggests historical examples of US wrongdoing are inadmissible, my argument in R2 centers not merely on the grossly political application of the statutes as discussed above, but also about the US’s moral authority to pursue retribution for crimes against humanity given the contingency of its humanitarian activity on political advantage—in addition to Guatemala, we can recall the deposition of a democratically-elected leader in Iran in 1953, funding of the Contras, positive or ambiguous relations with authoritarian rulers like Mubarak and Qaddafi, training of the Mujahideen, and the admitted funding of Saddam during the Iraq-Iran war. One of the requirements of jus ad bellum is right authority, in neither the moral nor legal sense of which the US appears to possess. Concerning jus in bello, even discounting the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, evidence for the minimization or necessity of which is specious, the record of human rights abuse, environmental and nutritional damage, displacement, destruction of infrastructure—evidence of US carelessness, in other words—are thoroughly documented [http://web.mit.edu...][http://rt.com...][http://www.amnesty.org...]. Out of space. Nice R3 Hitch.