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1. I’m not sure that the law that’s being discussed here “authorizes” war or merely recognizes that they happen—and that it’s possible for the international community (however that’s constituted) to pass judgments on the reasons given for them.
Assuming that the international community cares about this or that particular case. Which isn’t given in advance.
Are there cases where the international community has acted to stop a war because of the grounds provided?
Most actions that I know of are done on humanitarian grounds.
2. As for Libya: it’s pretty obviously international now. Oil, baby. And lots of it. The international community tends to get more interested when large amounts of publicly important resources are at stake. When resources that are important to corporate interests are at issue, as has been the case in Eastern Congo, for some reason the international community is less interested. (a basic element used in the production of micro-processing chips. I’ll play by the rules of a pub discussion and not look it up. I don’t remember which one.)
And it’s not real clear that the period before the UN resolution was one of civil war either. Depends on the information you access and what you think it means.
That the international community is the position of limiting a nation-state’s sovereign ability to inflict damage on its own citizens is not in question—of course it can. That the international community might fuck up while trying to figure out how to co-ordinate actions is also given—but that has no bearing on the capacity of the international community in principle. It does bear on the adequacy of existing institutions, however.
I think NATO may find its functions coming under question if the situation in Libya turns out the be the trap that Gadhafi’s folk are saying it is (with all the caveats about bluster and posturing in place). It wouldn’t surprise me to see people agitating for a new, more co-ordinated transnational enforcement mechanism with some actual teeth.
Of course, the limitation on this—the obstacle to its being set up---is the metropole itself. Countries like the US are too vain (and wacky, in the American case) to countenance the possibility (much less the reality) that their actions would be judged beyond the pale. Arguably the Bush Administration would have been so judged with its adventures into war crimes torturous and extraordinarily rendered.
American conservatives committed to “realist” positions on international policy really detest international law and so would have you believe that every action is a referendum not on the organizational abilities of the international community to limit national sovereignty, but on the legal framework itself. That’s a political statement and not a legal one, and is, in my view, just another form of dangerous gas.
3. The extension of humanitarian law into the micro-management of soldiers’ actions on the ground is interesting and complicated and has been getting to be a more and more pressing issue as a function of Afghanistan….the conflict in a “low-intensity conflict” situation between military personnels’ attempts to insure their own safety/well-being as over against that of civilians to not get shot up.
I’m not sure there’s an easy answer for this one. I can see an argument that establishing and maintaining humanitarian law that limits the right of military people to do just anything to maintain their own safety can function as a moral limit that can on its own have a positive effect---if the desired goal is to limit civilian casualties. But I can also see why plan 9 posted the Heinlein quote above.
I was initially thinking that humanitarian law was easier to apply back in the days before low-intensity conflict became the de facto strategic center of military operations---but that’s not true. The doctrine of total war obviates any distinction between military and civilian. Whether that’s acceptable or not depends on who’s doing it. The only real war crime is losing a war.
Then I was thinking: what about the military actions before total war became fashionable? Things weren’t a whole lot better if you were a civilian and armies were stomping about nearby---they were like locusts descending on your food supplies and probably weren’t always chivalrous with the ladies. But civilians weren’t often massacred. This is not to say that there was a rigid divide military-civilian. At the same time, the geographies of war were different. More limited.
I dont imagine it's great to be a civilian in any war situation...
(btw i wrote this earlier today...sorry about all the caps: i found the op interesting and so it was easiest to write on a word processing platform and flip back and forth between it and the op. after a few minutes, i stopped trying to fight the authoritarian capitalization thing)
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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