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

To: TimF who wrote (106283)	7/18/2003 11:45:00 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi twfowler; Re: "The US fought the first war, and primarily determined the cease fire rules." The first war was a huge coalition. Note that "primarily determined" is not the same as "determined". Re: "... we decided if and when the war would end and under what circumstances. As a party to the war and to the cease fire we don't need a UN decision* about if a breech occurred.*" The best way of analyzing justice is to verify that what is sauce for the goose is also sauce for the gander. Let's rewrite your argument by reversing the participants: "Saddam decided that the first war would end with an armistice, so it would also have been just if he had declared the armistice over and had used weapons against the United States. As a party to the agreement, he did not need a UN decision about whether the US was meeting the terms of the agreement." I should note that the armistice was two sided, and that there were terms that bound the US as well as Iraq. If you want to claim that your theory of "justice" involves the concept that only the weak parties are bound by agreements, well that makes you a "might makes right" whacko that cannot be argued with about the subject of justice. I don't have a copy of the armistice agreement, do you? I know that it was signed 3 days after the cease fire. Your argument creeps rather close to the point of view that "might makes just". One could just as easily have argued that since Iraq and Saddam had an even more important role in the armistice that ended the first war, therefore if Saddam had nuked us it would have been "just". In addition, our behavior in the war was restricted according to agreements that we made with our coalition partners. One of those agreements was that the purpose of the war was not regime change, but instead was the freeing of Kuwait. If the second war was a continuation of the first war, then it is an inescapable fact that we went back on our word to our coalition partners in the first war. In any case, the majority of our coalition partners in the first war were against our second war. If, on the other hand, you want to drop the armistice argument and claim that the defining document is instead the relevant UN resolutions, then our attack on Iraq without UN sponsorship is more obviously unjust. And in any case, ending an armistice by making repeated public reference to weapons that seem not to have existed is something more reminiscent of Germany's excuses for invading Poland in 1939 than anything that the US would like to be remembered for. -- Carl