Under international law, no country has been allowed to unilaterally invade a sovereign nation, period. That's been the policy for most of the world and has been the policy of the US until we invaded Iraq.
This is a point all too often missed.
There is a basic contradiction between the premise of absolute sovereignty and the entire concept of international law. Genocide may be against international law, but you can't enforce that law unless you violate sovereignty. It's against international law to invade and pillage your neighbors, but unless you are willing to violate sovereignty, it's practically impossible to hold those responsible to account for their actions.
Iraq makes a good example. Saddam violated international law flagrantly and repeatedly. He invaded a neighboring state and slaughtered his own people with reckless abandon. He was never help personally accountable for these actions until someone else violated international law in order to do it. He couldn't be held accountable as long as the principle of absolute sovereignty was sustained.
This points to a certain deficiency in international law. It's like saying murder is illegal, but it's illegal to arrest murderers.
There were excellent reasons for concerted multilateral action against Iraq. Sanctions were causing great misery to Iraqis but having no effect on Saddam. Sustaining sanctions and no-fly zones indefinitely was insupportable, but lifting them would have been surrender, and would only have encouraged Saddam to re-arm, resume violent suppression of dissident ethnic groups, and eventually take a bite of another neighbor. If sanctions couldn't be lifted or sustained, what options were available?
This is a very solid argument for regime change, but it doesn't meet the arbitrary "imminent threat" standard. This is one place where the Bush administration went off the rails, I think: instead of going to the heart of the matter and trying to introduce more flexible criteria for intervention in failed states and rogue states, they tried to meet the "imminent threat" criterion with a cobbled-together WMD issue.
The current system of international law reflects the realities of the 1940s, which have changed a great deal. One of the lessons of Iraq is that this system badly needs to be updated. |
