There was a lengthy discussion of this a while back on this thread.
Boils down to: do you want to live in a world of law even though some crimes may not be immediately identified, stopped, and punished?
Or do you want to live in a world of vigilante justice where whoever comes into town with the biggest guns can shoot anybody he or she decides is a bad guy?
Our West had number two. It decided to change to number one.
For good reasons.
The world effectively had number one up until the end of WW II. Then it decided to adopt number two when virtually every nation agreed to elect the UN as world sheriff. While far from perfect, it has worked amazingly well given the challenges facing it.
But over Yugoslavia the US (dragging Nato along with it) decided the sheriff might not take the action we wanted. We didn't trust the sheriff we elected and the law we agreed to. Instead, we decided we had big enough guns to become vigilantes. So we reverted the world back to vigilante justice.
I suggest you READ the Nato treaty and the UN charter, both adopted by the government of the United States. And tell me where you find any legal justification in those documents for our actions in Yugoslavia.
Then decide whether, in 20 years when China has a military five times the size of ours, a nuclear arsenal as big as ours, and a navy and airforce larger than ours, we still want to stick with the principle that might justifies international lawlessness. |
