At the risk of
smooth and I sounding like a mutual appreciation society, I don't think I could have put it better myself. [okay, i do have a slight disagreement - i think the US always tried to justify war as both self-defence and resolution enforcement - but i liked his post so i'll move on.]
OKAY. Here's the long and short of it. The law is a complex thing. There are three possible legal justifications for the US fighting Iraq (self-defence; they are still at war from Resolution 678 in 1990; they are legitimized by Resolution 1441). None of them are simple.
BUT we can all get a lot fruther in this discussion
if we all read this. It is a superb legal and political summary that contains both support and challenges for the posts of almost everyone here (including myself - I am not after all infalible).
I hope that people will go to the site, read it, tell us that they have read it and then come back with their thoughts.
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I have read it.
My thoughts are:
i) The only possible legal reasons, and the reasons that Powell took to the UN, for war, are different to the reasons given to the ordinary person. Humanitarian intervention or regime change were mentioned only in passing or not at all at the UN. There are legal reasons for deploying troops and then there are popular reasons for "sending in our boys". We must keep the two seperate and recognise them for what they are.
ii) The self-defence ( Article 51) justification seems dead in the water. The US may have decided to invent a new "Bush Doctrine of pre-emption" but noone else was buying it.
iii) Because everyone seems to agree that the ceasefire terms of the 1990 Resolution 687 had been breached, one way or another, then the issue of WMD is irrelevant to that justification. However this is another weak justification that even the US/UK seemed uninterested in pushing.
iii) So the only way the existence/absence of WMDs is genuinely relevant is in regard Resolution 1441. But how relevant are the WMDs? If Resolution 1441 was the only possible justification then the absence of WMDs is not a direct problem. It would only be embarrassing because the US/UK said that we didn't have time to go through a lengthy checking process under 1441 and must go in *NOW*. They could be accused of leaping ahead. They could be accused of lieing to justufy their leaping ahead. But the leaping ahead itself would not be illegal. This is very different to the self-defence case - where an absence of WMDs would pretty much void the self-defence legality.