Attack on Baghdad without new UN resolution illegal

This kind stuff of stuff is EXACTLY why that last resolution sucked. Ideally, they needed a commitment not only to allow the US to attack, but to require coalition forces to support the effort.

 

That's the neat thing about legal verbiage.....it's open to all sorts of interpretation.

My first question was Rabinder who?

So I did a quick search on the good barrister. Rabinder Singh: Specializing in human rights law and author of 'The Future of Human Rights in the United Kingdom.'

I'm not so myopic as to believe that the world is better off without people like the good barrister, but is it really any wonder that he didn't interpret the resolution as to mean that we should just bomb Iraq into oblivion at the first sight of opposition.

 

Panama!!!

 

Worthless...not the resolution...but this "legal opinon"...absolutely worthless...when push comes to shove, i bet it's not as "up for interpretation" as it might seem to be. we're already hearing tough words for iraq from france and russia.

 

The resolution requires the security council to reconvene prior to military action. My take is that the language in the resolution came with a lot of backroom deals. "If you will come back to the Council first we'll form a coalition and then attack."

Just my two cents.

 

But what does the Catholic Church think?

 

International law is a joke. Law is only as binding as the enforcement mechanism behind it. What's the enforcement mechanism of the UN? Oh yes, the US... how silly of me to forget.

"America... you've been bad! Now punish yourself!"

 

excellent point!

 

This is the fact that many would like to forget or ignore.

 

Blix bears brunt of hawks'frustration

Right finds new target after losing argument to fight swift war on Iraq

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday November 19, 2002
The Guardian

The claims by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, that he has been the target of a smear campaign by Pentagon hawks is the culmination of months of tension at the heart of the Bush administration about the UN inspection team.
Earlier this year the deputy secretary for defence, Paul Wolfowitz, ordered a CIA report on why Mr Blix, as chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s and 1990s, failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity. Mr Blix has much more sweeping powers now, but that fact has failed to banish the suspicions of a cluster of hardliners in the administration that includes Mr Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the under-secretary for defence, and John Bolton, the deputy secretary of state.

"There are a whole group of people in this administration who are against multilateral institutions, and also the people that staff them," said Joseph Cirincione, the director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Hans Blix to some of these people is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the multilateral approach."

The resurrection of UN arms inspections for Iraq is seen as a defeat for the hawkish sections of the administration - both for relatively straightforward nationalists such as the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as well as for the faction led by Mr Wolfowitz, who have been described by scholars as "democratic imperialists".

Mr Wolfowitz, influenced by Richard Perle, chairman of the defence policy board, is believed to view US military action in Iraq as the first step in a larger project of realignment and democratisation of the Middle East.

For months, the hardliners pressed home the case for a military strike against Iraq, ratcheting up their arguments to such an extent that intelligence officials complained of intense pressure to cook up information that would support a war.


more

 

This is how multilateral organizations work. One member wants to do something...says nasty things about those who oppose...and eventually a decision is made.

There is nothing unique about this.

 

This is why the UN is pretty much powerless.

Whenever the UN needs power, which nation does it turn to? Yep, the USA.

DaDakota