The US, UN & Iraq III

Oh my God, blatham, ROTFLMAO!!!

I can't, not honestly, Sofia. I not only think there will be more non-state terrorists acts (inevitable) but I'm with those who think America has become a terrorist nation. We're doin' it right now, and congratulating ourselves for it. Well, not all of us are.

Blatham, we should pay you for this entry. You've made me laugh until I cried. The worms of mass destruction.......I fear we'll lose this battle. Because even if we destroy the city around them (and which one would that be) we'll never get em all. They're breeding as we speak. Even the homeland security storm troopers won't be able to help us here.

We have the technology.
We can develop a hideous, insideous worm mite and drop wads of them over France! What would that be: Environmental Terrorism?
Take that Kyoto! Myeh!
It will cost billions, but what the hay...

blatham, that's the best laugh I've had all week. Thanks!

Yes indeed, blatham. Comic relief is ALWAYS welcome relief.

In regard to the UN we have witnessed a valiant attempt to achieve international Law but:

"More than anything else, however, it has been still another underlying difference in attitude -- over the need to comply with the UN's rules on the use of force -- that has proved most disabling to the UN system. Since 1945, so many states have used armed force on so many occasions, in flagrant violation of the charter, that the regime can only be said to have collapsed. In framing the charter, the international community failed to anticipate accurately when force would be deemed unacceptable. Nor did it apply sufficient disincentives to instances when it would be so deemed. Given that the UN's is a voluntary system that depends for compliance on state consent, this short-sightedness proved fatal

This conclusion can be expressed a number of different ways under traditional international legal doctrine. Massive violation of a treaty by numerous states over a prolonged period can be seen as casting that treaty into desuetude -- that is, reducing it to a paper rule that is no longer binding. The violations can also be regarded as subsequent custom that creates new law, supplanting old treaty norms and permitting conduct that was once a violation. Finally, contrary state practice can also be considered to have created a non liquet, to have thrown the law into a state of confusion such that legal rules are no longer clear and no authoritative answer is possible. In effect, however, it makes no practical difference which analytic framework is applied. The default position of international law has long been that when no restriction can be authoritatively established, a country is considered free to act. Whatever doctrinal formula is chosen to describe the current crisis, therefore, the conclusion is the same. "If you want to know whether a man is religious," Wittgenstein said, "don't ask him, observe him." And so it is if you want to know what law a state accepts. If countries had ever truly intended to make the UN's use-of-force rules binding, they would have made the costs of violation greater than the costs of compliance.

Indeed, it should have come as no surprise that, in September 2002, the United States felt free to announce in its national security document that it would no longer be bound by the charter's rules governing the use of force. Those rules have collapsed. "Lawful" and "unlawful" have ceased to be meaningful terms as applied to the use of force. As Powell said on October 20, "the president believes he now has the authority [to intervene in Iraq] ... just as we did in Kosovo." There was, of course, no Security Council authorization for the use of force by NATO against Yugoslavia. That action blatantly violated the UN Charter, which does not permit humanitarian intervention any more than it does preventive war. But Powell was nonetheless right: the United States did indeed have all the authority it needed to attack Iraq -- not because the Security Council authorized it, but because there was no international law forbidding it. It was therefore impossible to act unlawfully."

The preceding 3 paragraphs from
Why the Security Council Failed
From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2003 by Michael J Glennon

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20030501faessay11217-p20/michael-j-glennon/why-the-security-council-failed.html

Many here may disagree with or blame U.S. actions for "destroying" the UN. Indeed, I would invite any defenders of the UN as is and its history to visit this site for it contains reasons for them to "blame the U.S" for UN irrelevance towards serious global conflicts.However I would submit, again, that these supporters are irate with the U.S. for merely bringing to the surface the basic inadequacies with the UN Charter as presently constituted. Some may even try to attribute "Logical Fallacies" in the above quoted paragraphs. Should this occur and these fallacies are indeed found valid it could only make this part of the thread more interesting.

To those who might be so inclined I might suggest not to rely upon the technique of characterizing America's reasons for action as "Straw Men" or opining upon the shade of rouge regarding a species of Osteichthyes in an analogous attempt to denigrate national reasons for security. Whether or not the herring is "red" is not relevant to the narrow focus relating to causal facts as to UN shortcomings. What is relevant to the UN question is that given a crisis, nations do indeed act on perceived threats. Conversely, those nations so threatened are not the least concerned or assuaged by other nations questioning the validity of those threats. If one seriously intends to correct the faulty UN foundation he must recognize this simple fact before he can even begin to address the UN's foibles.

Just to be clear. I am inviting those who dissent with the first 3 paragraphs to refute those points presented in the cited paragraphs in kind. That is, with past global history as examples supporting any thoughtful comments to the contrary of those paragraphs.

Given the UN needs changing, how would we use the lessons we have learned thus far to either make it better or reconstruct its charter so as to effect a more "real world" oriented UN? Seriously.

Respectfully,

JM

JM -- The UN has an almost mystical, diabolical taint for many on the far right and indeed many populists. It's the UN which is, after all, taking over our national parks, which is part of the new world order conspiracy. One of the hardest things to do is argue with the nutcases who believe all this stuff in part because they have adopted a vocabulary which has been coopted by fanatics over the past twenty years from some of our best-intended internationalists. I actually heard a liberal argue some of these points with right-wingers on conspiracy radio the other night and, to my astonishment, he won quite a few points. But an ongoing problem for the rational American is dealing with the coopted phraseology of the fringe: one has to tiptoe around innocent concepts like "international cooperation" because that has come to mean "socialism" and "anti-Americanism." So how does one change the UN? Well, we're gonna have to start at home, in America, where we've behaved imperiously, welshed on our agreements, withheld payments and generally behaved really badly. We certainly owe it to the UN -- to our allies and the rest of the world -- to make that effort even before we'll be able to use our muscle when it comes to strengthening international laws, urgent though that has become.

the only option, as i see it, is to improve the UN not dismantle or ignore it. but i am one of those secular humanist knee-jerk liberals that thinks smart bombs are not intelligent solutions.

I really liked this letter to the NYTimes today:


War May Be Over, but Debate Goes On
To the Editor:

In "Matters of Emphasis" (column, April 29), Paul Krugman makes the case that the Bush administration took us into war, even though it knew that its stated reasons were not nearly correct.

If true, one can well imagine that a boost to the 2004 Bush campaign was not absent from administration reckonings, which, if true, would make the as-yet-uncounted costs of the Iraq war to the American people, not to mention the war deaths, an involuntary campaign contribution, and the freeing of Iraqi citizens a collateral benefit.
PIERRE E. BISCAYE
Westwood, N.J., April 29, 2003

Tartan, dys

Thanks for your posts. In my post citing a partial quote from:

Foreign Policy

Michael J Glennon mentions conceptual differences that are manifest by examining European and American (U.S.) views towards "Supranational Authority". The Europeans are more likely to accept this (i.e. the EU) than Americans. Witness:



I believe Alexis de Tocqueville also noted this difference in mind set in his classic "Democracy in America". Maybe it has something to do with the American colonists being left to fend for themselves for so long on a continent so richly endowed with natural resources that self reliance then became second nature. Interestingly, this same mind set made setting up a federalist republic so difficult, but some how it did finally come to pass.

I always enjoy Krugman's columns, he was one of the first to expose Bush's Tax cut plan with his thoughtful comments. Among other things it seems too little too late to stimulate the economy on the one hand and a burden to future taxpayers in the future on the other. (Alan Greenspan implied the latter in a statement he made a couple of days ago) But I digress.

JM

Bush declared tonight that the military phase of the battle to topple Saddam Hussein's government was "one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11th, 2001, and still goes on."
Full Text: Bush Speech Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln

So, the war isn't ended. Which means, no release of POW's as well as no domestic "making up waves", when the troops must go back to fight the majority of Iraquians, namely the diabolic Shi'a.

Unfortunately, these want freedom and democracy as well, didn't like Saddam ..... and obviously don't like the US-Americans and British occupiers in their country, too.

Oil wasn't only the main reason for this invasion. It has made - known to medecine since longtime - some people blind: without any existing working political and administrational organisation, you have to start from literally zero.
And this seems nearly impossible, just with some dozens exile Iraquians and against the majority.

So it may well be that Balcanian conditions are shimmering gold compared to what may happen in Iraq im future.

Of course, the administration wouldn't lie about why the war with Iraq was waged. They are men brave and true, and ought to be trusted.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2082419/

blatham -- was the slate quote yours or someone else's?

I had a wonderful moment of deja vu/insight this morning when I heard a reporter describing Bush emerging from the little plane onto the flight deck. He was all dressed up in a real military uniform and he'd flown in the co-pilot's seat. Exciting! Unreal! It wasn't just that Bush had ducked much of his National Guard duty after flight training, and was therefore a super-fraud -- a pathetic and funny little fellow, ripe for Chaplinizing. It reminded me of being the little kid of an "important" father, the kid who sometimes got to sit behind the desk or ride in the limo with or curtsey to royalty alongside of. You wind up with some familiarity with that world but aren't really of it. Bush, never having made or achieved a damn thing on his own, knows the world he occupies now very well, but is not part of it. He has that aura of hanger-on -- I recognize him but I don't empathize because at about 16 I stopped pretending and he, of course, never has.

James

There are a number of claims or assumptions in your last two posts which bear scrutiny.

For starters, let's take this statement
That is rather like claiming that a madman wearing a clown suit and walking into a primary school with a loaded shotgun is doing the community a favor by bringing to the surface deficiencies in primary school security and treatment for the insane. So, no, that's not the complaint. The complaints are 1) unilateralism and 2) lying to the world and US citizens about why and 3) the insensitivity to life and property and social conduct rules which bullies always manifest.

Then, you said
You've managed, again, to smuggle in the very same red herring of 'this is a defensive war for national security based on perceived threat' while claiming that this deceit is not relevant to the issue of why the US did what it did, or why it might be taken to task, or how this relates to supra-national matters. Good trick. That the UN is imperfect, and perhaps particularly in the sphere of when and how to allocate military action, wasn't previously a deep secret.

I really like this line from the piece
As we all know, the US claimed authority/legality to act lay in the UN resolutions, though this was by no means clear to anyone other than those who wanted to so act. But this argument quoted gives us even more room to go blasting others to hell - there's no UN rule against blasting others to hell. It's a helpful observation.

In your second post, you address a different mindset (pardon the term) between the US and Europe. And here I partly agree with you. Clearly, many European states find it quite possible to operate inter-dependently in ways which the US resists (and we ought to note, this is serving those EU states quite well by a number of measures). You speak to the US history and how it came to manifest 'self-reliance'. And here is where we part company, because right here is where the myths of US exceptionalism begin (truer religion, truer democracy, truer liberty, truer goodness, etc). The problem you point to - the difficulty of a supra-national body such as the UN to accomodate the diversity of interests of the world's states is a real difficulty. But it's not impossible, as you suggest in pointing to your own federation of states. But it IS impossible where one of those states absolutely refuses to fall within the confines of an over-arching set of principles and rules. There is NO possible design for such a supra-national body available in such a case.

Dictatorial and autocratic minds always believe that they are the solution, not the problem.

visitor

If you refer to the multi-colored post above, both quotes from the same Slate writer.

Tartarin

As one old Bush school-chum said, "He was born on third base, and thinks he hit a homerun." I now have heard from two women who have met Bush, and their reports are not encouraging - he is a very rude, pompous, and unsophisticated human. I love 'Chaplinize' as verb by the way.

Tartarin and Blatham,

My gut response to the photos of him in my morning Washington Post this am were quite similar but add extreme nausea. To think that this pipsqueek of privilege was featured as "TOP GUN" is just disgusting. If any Democrat had tried to pull off such a hypocrital event with the history of GWBush (AWOL, drugs during Vietnam) they would be ridiculed. The NYTimes article I read said mentioned he might use it during the '04 re-election campaign. I hope he does...with the fervant hope that someone out there has the gumption to call it for what it is.

Blatham...reading "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" by Hofstader on your recommendation. I bet he would have a few pithy things to say about Dubya.

vietnamnurse

Wonderful! I'm pleased as punch you've picked up that book. There is indeed very very much of relevance to Mr. Bush and these times to be found there (eg, the vulgarity of life when the businessman is in ascension). And he is such a good writer. From memory, in writing about John Dewey's difficult and often unclear prose, Hofstadter says, "It's a bit like hearing the rumble of distant cannonading. You know something important is going on but you're not sure just what it is."