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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: TimF who wrote (145846)9/17/2004 2:09:39 PM
From: GST   of 281500
 
<If you consider the action unilateral because it was done by "one side" than any allies we might have gained (including official sanction by the UN) would have still left it as an action of one side on the other. In terms of one party or one country it was not unilateral. If you (and perhaps McNamara) have some non-standard use of the term, than perhaps it would be better if you substituted a term which you can use the same as everyone else does.>

The use of the term unilateral is sometimes confused -- as you seem to do -- with an association with multilateral. This is a fallacy in the case of declaring war. Lets take a related example -- negotiations. You can have bilateral negotiations and you can have multi-lateral negotiations, but you cannot have unilateral negotiations. In the case of declaring war, unilateral refers to the attack as in we were "unilaterally attacked". Bin Laden unilaerally attacked the US. This refers to the unprovoked nature of the attack. When one country attacks another without actionable cause, as would be the case say in self-defense, the action is call "unilateral" or one-sided. It makes no difference whatsoever whether or not you have partners in the attack -- an attack by one hundred countries against one country would still be "unilateral" if there was no actionable cause for the attack. The US had NO actionable cause -- and hence the US attack on Iraq was unilateral. The UN was in a completely different position and had a potential actionable cause relating to the unsettled terms of the first gulf war. However, only the UN can decide the actions that will or will not be taken in its name, and that responsibility lies with the Security Council of the UN, not with Washington and George Bush. A UN invasion would NOT have been unilateral, not because the UN has many members but because the UN led the action to defend Kuwait and it was with the UN that Iraq agreed to terms to end the first gulf war.
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