What laws are you talking about? What laws are we throwing away? What are the
exceptions to these laws? Has every nation signed and agreed to abide by these rules?
Has Yugoslavia signed and agreed to these rules?
See my post on the NATO and UN Charters. I am not an expert in international law, but I am trained to read legal documents, and it appears clearly to me that we are violating the NATO treaty and the UN Charter, both of which we have signed. Yugoslavia certainly signed the UN Charter; I don't know about the new Serbian Republic, but we are committed to it.
I know of no written laws which give us the right to do what we are doing. Do you?
Once we get into the realm of "unwritten laws" which directly violate laws we have specifically agreed to follow, where does it end? We rely on international law to give us the right, for just one example, to extradite and try the accused Lockerbie bombers and will be the law under which we may some day attempt to try Bin Laden. We rely on many countries to follow their treaty obligations. If we claim that there are unwritten laws which permit us to make up new law as we go along even when that new law violates existing law, we are in exactly the ame position as, say, Bin Laden, who claims that Islamic law (which is a form of moral law, but not accepted international law) gives him the legal right to bomb US embassies, etc.
Our concept of "moral law" and the world's concepts of "moral law" are often VERY different. (For just one example, look at the legal rights or nonrights of women in certain countries.) Those who follow moral laws different from ours are almost certainly in the majority in this world, so if we follow some sort of concept of world democracy to select moral law, we lose.
I, for one, don't want to open the can of worms that says any nation may follow what it believes is moral law in bombing a country which it believes is violating its concept of moral law even when that bombing violates established, written international law.
Do you really want to go down that path? |
