The Iraq War was Justified!

Pro's C3 and C4 are defensive in nature against what he imagines I may argue. Any overlap between that and my own case will be covered in due course--what remains will not pertain to me--but my rebuttal will really be aimed primarily at Pro’s legal argument, his positive case for invasion. C2 is less an argument than a selective and emotional appeal to history: what is in question is whether the war is justified, not whether there would have been negative consequences for refusing to intervene. C1: Legality 1. As I observed in R1, the justification we seek is of the final or fundamental sort. Pro has accepted my request not to limit the scope of the debate, and, as such, I would call into question the nature of the authority of law. By what right does law claim its authority? There are many potential explanations—a utilitarian might say that a law must tend to maximize the balance of good over evil, whereas a legal positivist might suggest that it requires as its source a just authority—but these answers really only raise further questions. By what standard is there really anything like “just authority”? Fundamentally, there is always something like sovereignty which constitutes the law. In democratic societies, sovereignty is attributed to an abstraction—the People. In traditional authoritarian and monarchical societies, a single ruler is sovereign. The Divine Right of Kings is the paradigm of this sort of rule. If law is legitimated by sovereign decree, then, it follows we should ask after the nature of sovereignty. While in the monarchy there is a transcendent foundation, God, we find in the contemporary secular world that a People, an abstract, unified political unit, has the say. And why is this? What is the nature of that right which confers on a sovereign its power? I have yet to find any such right, and, indeed, most of history’s sovereigns find themselves ruling not by right, but by mere reason of force. It was conquest that delimited the European powers as we know them, and, indeed, national autonomy was not considered a fundamental right of states until the Westphalia Accords of 1648. Even in the case of the American colonies—themselves established, the same as their Spanish and French counterparts, by force—the assumed right of a self-determined people to expand and flourish, the idea of Manifest Destiny, entailed the displacement and the slaughter of the natives. Sovereign power, and consequently, the authority of the law, find for themselves no real foundation, either transcendent or immanently ethical, but only force. Insofar as this is true, the authority of law, local or international, is hardly sufficient to confer on the Iraq War the order of justification we seek. 2. Suppose nevertheless that I grant the legitimacy of law—there remain many ways in which it does not justify the war. First, Articles 5 and 6 of the Genocide Convention [http://www.hrweb.org...] provide only for the trial, whether by competent domestic or international tribunal, of those accused of genocide. What is important about the requirement of competence is that, supposing a party to the convention is in such a state that it does not have the standing, moral, legal, or political, to conduct a trial, other powers must intervene. The only possible exception is in Article 8, which states: “Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3.” While this includes, per Article 42 of the UN Charter [http://www.un.org...], the possibility of military force, this can only legally be sought through competent organs of the UN, among which (discounting for a moment arguments concerning the use by great powers of the UN to further their interests) is the Security Council; however, Pro readily admits that the US did not pursue the legal channels enumerated in these documents. Hence, even granting the authority of the law, the US was not following it. The possibility of a “backdoor” is also not made clear just from Article 50 of the Geneva Conventions. 3. If the law heretofore mentioned is to be strictly applied, we might question the standing of the United States to act. Consider some of the definitions of the crimes to which my opponent gestures, and consider concurrently some of the US’s actions respective of these crimes: Genocide Convention, Article 2: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Article 3: The following acts shall be punishable: (a) Genocide; (b) Conspiracy to commit genocide; (c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; (d) Attempt to commit genocide; (e) Complicity in genocide. Pro also references, in the Geneva Conventions, willful killing, torture, and inhuman treatment. We know that the United States, especially during the course of the War on Terror, is likely guilty of many of these—the US tortures suspected terrorists in places like Guantanamo Bay; in Abu Gharib, many sorts of abuse took place, including physical and psychological abuse [http://www.newyorker.com...][ http://www.newyorker.com...], and the Justice Department, rather than trying outright to deny it, has released memos pointing to the potential justifiability of so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques [http://www.washingtonpost.com...]. Sanctions imposed since the early 1990s, despite having little effect on the regime and major negative impacts on civilians [http://www.mapw.org.au...], including widespread malnutrition, water and medical supply shortages, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children, took more than a decade—until Saddam had finally been captured—to repeal. And, as for the war itself, Wikipedia has been kind enough to gather a list of credible estimates—including AP, the Costs of War Project, Wikileaks cables, and the Lancet—of civilian deaths caused by the war and occupation [http://en.wikipedia.org...]. Indeed, as far back as the 1980s, we find the US even responsible for training and financing, as a foreign policy move, the Guatemalan military when it was committing clear acts of genocide during a long period of civil war [http://www.nytimes.com...]. The US has not lived up to its “Never again!” proclamation, not merely due to negligence, but owing to outright contradiction of its stated position. The United States has repeatedly violated the legal standards in the establishment of which it had a direct and very influential hand. There is little, either in its motivating principles or in the manner in which it was conducted, to justify the Iraq War. This is to say nothing, moreover, of the numerous false premises, of which only two are claimed by Pro to be even minutely credible, on which the American public was initially led to support the invasion and occupation. Saddam was a criminal, but that neither excused nor justified becoming criminals to stop him.