War Law
In the years before 11th September, wealthier governments seemed slowly to be moving towards a stable global order of international laws. General Pinochet had been arrested; the Kyoto protocol had been signed; and Slobodan Milosevic was on trial in the Hague. Now the US is committed to attacking Iraq, a recognised autonomous state, without specific authorisation from the UN Security Council or a specific prior act of aggression.
For thinkers as diverse as Noam Chomsky, the military historian Michael Howard and political analyst Stanley Hoffman, the US response to 11th September should be to treat it like a crime and its perpetrators as criminals. They should, in this view, be delivered before an international court, rather than treated as combatants in a war. The same analysis, law not war, now extends to the imminent crises in Iraq.
But is the world's greatest military power acting outside international law? The debate is being explored, with clarity and in engrossing detail, on the web. The recently established crimesofwar.org aims to "promote understanding of international humanitarian law among journalists, policymakers, and the general public, in the belief that a wider knowledge of the legal framework governing armed conflict will lead to greater pressure to prevent breaches of the law, and to punish those who commit them." The website has asked five distinguished figures to assess the idea of "pre-emptive self-defence." They address issues such as: "how does the UN charter deal with self-defence?"; "when is a first strike acceptable?; and "the dangers of unilateralism." Their conclusions make fascinating reading. The experts, for the most part, show that some forms of pre-emptive self-defence are legitimate; but all questioned whether a US attack on Iraq would fulfil the necessary criteria. They agree that there was a profound need for the US administration to "provide convincing evidence that Iraq is working with terrorist groups in a way that threatens the use of weapons of mass destruction against the US or its allies."
Foreign Affairs (foreignaffairs.org) magazine also draws together its many pieces on the Bush doctrine, mixing its analysis with the wider geopolitical picture. The pieces are for the most part elegantly written and very instructive and can be downloaded for a small fee.
As many people will already know, Arts and Letters Daily (aldaily.com) is no more. Following the bankruptcy of its proprietor, the American magazine Lingua Franca, the world's greatest website has ceased its daily postings. Its editors, Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, have stopped scanning the world's media and have struck out in new directions. It's going to be very hard to fill the void they've left behind.
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