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

To: tekboy who wrote (78036)	2/27/2003 12:06:01 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Attack not yet legal, says expert By Cynthia Banham The Sydney Morning Herald February 27 2003 The latest United Nations Security Council draft resolution would not be sufficient to authorise a United States-led attack on Iraq under international law, an expert from one of the world's most prestigious international relations schools, Nicholas Wheeler, said yesterday. Dr Wheeler's comments came as lawyers and academics around Australia called on the Howard Government to "observe the rule of law" in international law, and to publicly reveal any advice it had suggesting a pre-emptive strike against Iraq could be justified. The call to reveal the legal advice came from the NSW Bar Association, and followed the publication of a letter from eminent legal experts in the Herald who claimed an invasion of Iraq could constitute a war crime. The experts also warned that Australian military personnel and government officials faced the threat of being hauled before the newly established International Criminal Court if they took part in a conflict in Iraq. The US, unlike Australia, refused to ratify the ICC statute last year. Dr Wheeler, a senior lecturer from the University of Wales in Aberystwyth - the site of the world's first department of international relations - said at a talk in Canberra that the draft resolution submitted by the US, Britain and Spain this week merely restated resolution 1441 from November, but what was required was a resolution stating Iraq was in material breach and authorising the "use of all necessary means". "The language of 'all necessary means' is all you need to say because we've used through the 1990s the language of 'all necessary means' as a euphemism for the use of force - as long as you've got that you have a very clear mandate for war," Dr Wheeler said. His view was supported by Professor Hilary Charlesworth of the Australian National University - one of the signatories to the Herald letter - who said the latest draft resolution depended "so much" on resolution 1441, about which all the Security Council members had different views, and "just continues the ambiguity". Professor Charlesworth also said Australians involved in any war in Iraq - including politicians - could find themselves complicit in the committing of war crimes, and so liable to prosecution in the ICC, particularly because Iraq was a highly urbanised country. She said the definition of war crimes in international law included causing "excessive civilian damage that's disproportionate to the military objective". "What's excessive? What's disproportionate? These are matters for judgement, but it would seem to me that [with] estimates of a quarter of a million dead ... it's not difficult to say that is excessive civilian damage in light of the military objective of disarming Iraq." Dr Wheeler also warned that the Bush Administration's request for a legal basis to launch a "preventive war, where there is no imminent danger but where you believe that danger will materialise", was extremely dangerous. smh.com.au

To: tekboy who wrote (78036)	2/27/2003 12:26:44 AM
From: paul_philp	Respond to of 281500

Tekboy, Great, thanks for the tip. I have been looking for just such a beast. Paul

To: tekboy who wrote (78036)	2/27/2003 1:45:00 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

How Long Will Our Allies Put Up With Bush? Published: Feb 20 2003 By John Prados - a senior analyst with the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. His current book is Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby. tompaine.com The present course of the Bush administration quite plainly threatens regime change. Not changes in Iraq's regime, although American military power may well bring that about, but a transformation of the entire pattern of the United States' relationships with the world. Americans have long been taught that international alliances and cooperation form the bedrock of our standing in the modern world. Global economics depends on that kind of cooperation; global politics builds on it. Talking about the United States as a "hyperpower" obscures the fact that we exist within an international system. That system required decades to craft, but now finds itself under threat after only two short years of the Bush administration. The juxtaposition of the current war on terrorism with a near-certain conflict in Iraq throws these developments into sharp relief. Americans need to pay attention to Bush administration demands on the international system, as these strains are triggering subtle changes that are not in our best interests. We learned this lesson once before, in the inter-war era of the twentieth century, the time between the end of one world war and the onset of a second, when the failure of international collective action (then expressed in the League of Nations) enabled an enormously destructive new war to occur. At the urging of isolationist leaders, the United States had not joined the League of Nations. During the heat of World War II, four months before the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt held a conference with British leader Sir Winston Churchill aboard a British warship anchored at Placentia Bay in Canada. That August 1941 meeting adopted an "Atlantic Charter" that expressed principles -- such as self-determination and freedom from want -- to be upheld by collective action. These principles were invoked at the creation of the United Nations in 1945, and again by the foundation of the Atlantic alliance known as NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) five years later. Presidents from Truman to Kennedy worked to strengthen NATO, and Eisenhower tried to extend the structure by establishing similar alliances in regions across the globe, yet the core relationship has remained the one that spans the Atlantic. The system has withstood shocks before. The Vietnam War proved divisive in many countries, and American rejection of its allies' advice put strains on the structure. The international financial chaos that resulted when Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in 1972 typified another kind of strain, as did the conflicts of the late '80s and early '90s over global environmental standards (now enshrined in the Kyoto agreement). Not all strains have been products of U.S. action -- when the British and French invaded Egypt in 1956 (the Suez crisis), Atlantic allies were pressuring America to involve itself in their rear-guard colonial wars. But those tensions eventually eased, and the underlying web of mutual interests always pulled the allies back together. Optimists today argue that the same thing will happen again, that after a day or a year people and leaders will overcome their resentments. But today's situation is unprecedented, and possibly irreparable; one need only look to the Bush administration's foreign policy actions for glaring evidence. Rather than defying the system on a single demand or issue, George W. Bush has shocked America's friends on multiple counts. Bush's renunciation of the Kyoto standards, U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, and the administration's "unsigning" from the treaty establishing an international war crimes tribunal (actually illegal under applicable international law), plus its disputes over commodities and preferences within the World Trade Organization -- all these posed direct challenges to our global partners. Separately and together, these issues were sparking conflict before September 11, 2001. Politically, Bush actually profited from the 9/11 attacks, which diverted everyone's attention from the growing discord within NATO. The Bush administration requires international cooperation to even hope for success in the terror war. But having pocketed alliance help in Afghanistan, in police actions, and in halting money-laundering efforts, the administration has left the allies to pick up the tab for rebuilding the demolished former Taliban seat while claiming the credit for itself. The United States has also snubbed alliance views on a constructive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An Iraq war portends more of the same unilateralism -- a U.S. determination to go to war in spite of what allies think, and in spite of the costs that Bush's decisions in Washington will incur in Europe. Win or lose in Iraq, gasoline prices will rise in Copenhagen and Vienna, not merely in Cincinnati. The looming question is, how long will America's allies put up with Bush's behavior? Europe -- and this is a hidden development -- is stronger and more united today than ever before, with increasing reason to resent American arrogance. A European political move to the right will be about building an autonomous superpower -- not about cooperating more fully with the United States. At the same time, another round of U.S. pocketing support then rejecting European concerns -- which looks likely if a "coalition of the willing" attacks Iraq -- will push our traditional alliance partners in the same direction. Meanwhile the issues in the European-American relationship that were masked by 9/11 have not disappeared; they are simply submerged at the moment. Those issues will resurface to disturb a harmonious alliance, and push our friends toward independence in the form of a United States of Europe. It's ironic that the net result of the Bush war could do more for European integration than decades of economic and political efforts; it will be doubly so if a strengthened Europe supplants a United States weakened by war and economic recession as the new world hyperpower.