To: robnhood who wrote (10477 ) 5/30/1999 2:55:00 AM From: Bilow Read Replies (2) | Respond to
Hi rrman; Just picked up the latest Harpers, and it has the March 30 Noam Chomsky article in it, which you have all, no doubt, read already. I have been totally horrified by the US involvement in something that is clearly a violation of all sane principles of international relations since it began. But reading his writing (and I disagree with most of what he writes, probably, but I agree 100% with this particular article) got me ired enough to look up the Kosovo thread.The Current Bombings (March 30, 1999) In the scholarly disciplines of international affairs and international law it would be hard to find more respected voices than Hedley Bull or Louis Henkin. Bull warned 15 years ago that "Particular states or groups of states that set themselves up as the authoritative judges of the world common good, in disregard of the views of others, are in fact a menace to international order, and thus to effective action in this field." Henkin, in a standard work on world order, writes that the "pressures eroding the prohibition on the use of force are deplorable, and the arguments to legitimize the use of force in those circumstances are unpersuasive and dangerous... Violations of human rights are indeed all too common, and if it were permissible to remedy them by external use of force, there would be no law to forbid the use of force by almost any state against almost any other. Human rights, I believe, will have to be vindicated, and other injustices remedied, by other, peaceful means, not by opening the door to aggression and destroying the principle advance in international law, the outlawing of war and the prohibition of force. zmag.org
