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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jcky who wrote (35054)	7/26/2002 2:30:26 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi jcky, well D'Amato's thesis is interesting. I never know quite how to take these proponents of international law. They speak so seriously, one would suppose that international law really existed and was enforced in the world. Since it doesn't, except for certain treaties of quite limited scope and effect, their overall message arrives curiously divorced from reality. the Kellogg-Briand Peace Pact of 1928, as definitively glossed by the International Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1948, has abolished forever the idea of acquisition of territory by military conquest. No matter who was the aggressor, international borders cannot change by the process of war. Resort to war is itself illegal, and while self-defense is of course legal, the self-defense cannot go so far as to constitute a new war of aggression all its own. Does this mean that the many, major border-shifts that followed WWII are all illegal, and we must put Germany back into the borders of the Weimar Republic, move Poland 200 miles east again, and give Kaliningrad back to Germany? No? Why not? Does Eretrea have to go back into Ethiopia, and Bangladesh into Pakistan? Why not? How come efforts to apply arguments like this always revolve around exactly one real-world case, Israel? And D'Amato has argued himself into a real corner as far as I can see. He's the only person I've seen who has ever argued that the UN had no right to grant the partition except insofar as they inherited the right from the British. Since the British decamped in 1948, that means that the UN Partition borders are the only legal borders forever and ever, ad saecula saeculorum, amen! Never mind that the rest of the world (save the Arabs of course) recognizes the 1949 borders. An argument that elevates the power of the Brits as Mandatees over international recognition (the only real-world scorecard) is a most peculiar argument indeed. Of course the 1947 borders were completely indefensible (three times the length of the 1949 borders), but that's okay, war is illegal, right? I'm sure Prof. D'Amato, who sounds fair-minded, in a cloud-cuckoo land sort of way, would also argue that the Arabs would be in violation of international law if they had managed to destroy Israel in 1948, 1967 or 1973. I mean, how can you take someone seriously who says things like this with a straight face The sanctity of international borders is a principle of international law that antedates the Charter of the United Nations; in fact it goes back five thousand years. Oh yeah, and the borders have hardly changed in all that time! roflmao!