bbking said:
... your point is. International Law is based on treaties, charters and sundry other documents and this would include the UN Charter. You and others are trying to apply the Iraq war as state law when they say the Iraq war was/is illegal.
Despite what you may think the US cares very much about International Law, and was very careful during it's run-up to war with Iraq to make at least a half assed case for self defense. The only objection the US has in International Law is the World Court which under it's current set-up would allow anyone to law a complaint against any official in Washington, during or after their tenure, a position I'm some what sympathic to.
bbk
You're putting words in my mouth; international law's a concept not a practicality, so I wouldn't and haven't said the Iraq war's "illegal", and it's silly to be disputing this non-issue. Equally silly and far more serious is the US citing such 'non-law' and invoking half-truths about the decisions of the UN to justify its unwarranted invasion. I'm sure if Mr. Powell or Ms Rice posted here, they'd be more scrupulous in their wording than some others have been. A claim that the invasion is legal is as wrong as claiming the other, and I'll continue to dispute any such claim.
If the US sincerely cared about international law as anything more than an expediency, it would be active in promoting the International Criminal Court and trying to make it a useful functioning body, just as one example. If they cared about international law they'd have waited for the UNSC to resolve that Iraq was in breach and that the UN had properly determined a punitive action and deputized them to carry it out.
They were no more acting in accordance with international law—in whatever condition it may exist today—than a lynch mob mouthing equally self-serving pronouncements about their respect for right and wrong, claiming the real authorities they won't support are corrupt or enfeebled, so now only they act for the law and justice.
To make the analogy more exact, the coalition lynched a misfit, who'd done horrible things in the past, but who was under house arrest now. They lynched him not for what he'd done, but for what he might do with the molotov cocktails they heard he was making, even though his parole officer said, "we've looked for them and haven't seen any, not even bottles, nor gas cans". The world's better off without the guy, but we'd be even better off if we had laws against lynch mobs. Without laws none of us are safe.
So illegal schmillegal; they're just plain wrong, and their self-justifications are transparently hypocritical. Maybe good enough for the XVIIIth century*, but shouldn't we have progressed even a little? By not letting them get away with it in the court of public opinion, maybe someday there'll be a real court to haul them into.
* Mediaeval times actually, when the crown having declared someone an outlaw, all were thereby authorized to kill him on sight. But I forgot, that's Wanted; Dead or Alive isn't it? In the US that lasted considerably later didn't it, so XIXth C's maybe about right.
