Benghazi...oh you knew it was coming

[Kirkland Laing]

I also find VC quite hilarious with his pompous spiel about there being no
such thing as an illegal or legal war. So American. Of course it cannot be illegal if it is us doing it! Just as the lunatic Israeli's believe settlement building is nothing more than putting up trees in the park, it is America's god given right to inflict manifest destiny upon any nation should the whim to do so set in. 'Legality, no such thing'. Invade who you want when you want and see how that plays out if you are not of the annointed nations.

There isn't anything pompous about my post. There is not a legal precedent for when war is allowed or not. I think you confuse international law on how war is conducted with a non-existant legal basis to go to war. This is true for all countries not just the US and I never said different if you had any ability at objectivity you'd have realized that. We've had this conversation before and you were never able to provide the international legal binding document that prescribed when military action is "legal" or the legal body that rules on such things and typically resorted to threatening me with bodily harm. The act of going to war is a lot of things but it is not a matter of legality.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Iraq war illegal, says Annan

The UN doesn't create international law on the legality of war that all nations must follow. No one does. Annan said "I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time - without UN approval and much broader support from the international community," So he can say illegal but what he means is acts of aggression are ok if you get enough votes in the UN.

The US is a signatory to the UN charter. The US acted against the wishes of the Security Council and the vast majority of the world's countries in invading Iraq. America had no legal sanction to invade. How the UN defines whether acts of aggression are OK or not is up to them.

[VictorCharlie]

The US is a signatory to the UN charter. The US acted against the wishes of the Security Council and the vast majority of the world's countries in invading Iraq. America had no legal sanction to invade. How the UN defines whether acts of aggression are OK or not is up to them.

The UN charter isn't binding international law nor does it define what legal war is and if world history shows us anything, sanction or no sanction, nations do what they want. You can call the Iraq war unnecessary, immoral, stupid etc and I'll generally agree with you but if at the end of the day it is all whether or not you won a popularity contest that decides if it is "legal" then we should agree that isn't how the "law" works. I'll pose to you the same thing I did to Miles: provide me the codified document that spells out for the entire world what makes the use of military operations legal and the legal body that rules on them and I will concede and sincerely apologize. The only court I'm aware of that rules on "crimes of aggression" is the International Criminal Court and its jurisdiction is only for crimes committed in the territory of a state party or if they are committed by a national of a state party. So they have jurisdiction over 100 or so nations (the US isn't a state party) on this topic but not the whole world.

[Gandalf]

The UN is the best of what we have and as has been argued, only rogue states prevent it from working effectively. The worlds sole superpower is the leading rogue state and only academia in that environment would seek to justify it. The same thing happened with Israel in 1967, American academia was suddenly awash with literature telling us why The Holocaust was unique and interestingly it paralleled with Israel being a leading client terrorist state. Likewise, with America rejecting the UN, we are now being told that America can do what it likes and that Nuremburg and the UN, don't/didn't matter. There is no such thing as illegal or legal! This kind of line blurring is incredibly dangerous. Again, it is largely language coming from people educated in America in fields of politics, history etc and in the last decade or so. We have seen much the same with the Chicago school of economics in that double speak is used to basically say US corporations have a right to do anything anywhere. Academia by people who have to justify power and to spread the gospel of power as they are entrenched within.

To argue that something is illegal or not ends up being something that lawyers will dance around. To say that historical precedents have no meaningful factor upon the now is dismissive and something that would only be ever said by someone entrenched within a system and indoctrinated that way. Most rational people would argue that the UN should matter and that the only ones who dislike it would be rogue states such as Israel and America. It is no accident that everyone is wrong all the time and only they are in the right and yet are always a tiny minority and far more than US media sources would ever let on to their public.

The US in particular hates the UN because it shows them that the world disagrees with them on a wide range of issues. This information is never revealed in the media and anything that does is painted into an anti UN story. Sadly, most of those that read papers like to think truth must come from within. This just isn't the case. And then you have absurdist legalese talking about legality of wars and posters on here taking such stances seriously. Law is simply what is permitted in a particular environment and unfortunately we are living in a lawless planet largely due to America. Who needs law when you have a country that pretends such things don't exist with wars and torture and Kafka torture camps and it extends to the homeland too with homeland security etc.

To argue that a war is truly illegal, you would be asking for a paper from God and he doesn't exist, so we operate here on earth with what we have and they are legal precedents as they were settled in courts of law. We just choose to ignore them because the superpower is acting how it wants and most media and academic types just want to justify the system that is.

[El Kabong]

so you don't have documentation then and your argument is moot?

[Kirkland Laing]

The US is a signatory to the UN charter. The US acted against the wishes of the Security Council and the vast majority of the world's countries in invading Iraq. America had no legal sanction to invade. How the UN defines whether acts of aggression are OK or not is up to them.

The UN charter isn't binding international law nor does it define what legal war is and if world history shows us anything, sanction or no sanction, nations do what they want. You can call the Iraq war unnecessary, immoral, stupid etc and I'll generally agree with you but if at the end of the day it is all whether or not you won a popularity contest that decides if it is "legal" then we should agree that isn't how the "law" works. I'll pose to you the same thing I did to Miles: provide me the codified document that spells out for the entire world what makes the use of military operations legal and the legal body that rules on them and I will concede and sincerely apologize. The only court I'm aware of that rules on "crimes of aggression" is the International Criminal Court and its jurisdiction is only for crimes committed in the territory of a state party or if they are committed by a national of a state party. So they have jurisdiction over 100 or so nations (the US isn't a state party) on this topic but not the whole world.

But Bush asserted UN resolutions as the justification for his invasion of Iraq. Either the UN resolutions are binding international law or they're not.