Int'l Law and Pax Americana

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What about renegade organizations that have, in their Dogma, orders to kill all infidels (with the majority of American, Canadian, and European citizens qualifying as infidels)? Any Government that interferes with a nation's means of rooting out those threats risks invasion under The New World Order that President Bush is working on risks losing their country (see Afghanistan, Iraq). If these threats persist, and nations support this, then The next world war is imminent...

 

Of course. I don't recall claiming otherwise

Mostly true. I'd argue that's common to most nations, though, human nature being what it is. It's always easier for people to adopt the "them and us" mentality than to, like, carefully examine wtf the other guys want and why they want it.

Nonono. If they change disastrous policy, the politicians have to admit to the public that they screwed the pooch. Good luck getting re-elected on the "yeah, umm, we kinda screwed up. Repeatedly. For a couple years" platform.

Far easier to stay the course, and much less risky. Politically speaking.

In part. Still, considering the vast amounts of blood that saturate the tapestry of history, I seriously doubt the 20th century would've been much more peaceful without Cold War + decolonisation.

People always find reasons to kill each other. What was that line in the old fable? "If it isn't one thing, it's another"

[sarcasm] too much emphasis on reconstructing nations, not enough emphasis on deconstructing them[/sarcasm]

 

The threat from renegade regimes is the lowest of all imaginable threats, because they have a housenumber, and should the U.S. ever find credible evidence for such a case people would support them as they did after 911 and in Afghanistan. U.S. legitimacy, although scratched by Bush’s anti-int’l law stance since well before 911- still stood then.

Well, but it didn't need Iraq for that, a country that didn't have anything to do with 911, to make a case in point -- the U.S. had been to Afghanistan already and made their point clear. And in Afghanistan people just said: "Well, that's what you get ..."

U.S. standing was actually still pretty good after 911 until they decided to 'do' Iraq over their balloney WMD case that mutated into bringing freedom and liberty and whetever else. Why I bring that up?

Because at it's core int'l law is about legitimacy.

Since Afghanistan we hadn’t anything but this frenzied 'If you're not with us, you're against us' nonsense, along with freedom fries and wild bashing of anyone and anything that dared disagree with America's self-rightous fury.

Legitimacy arises from the conviction that state action proceeds within the ambit of law, in two senses: first, that action issues from rightful authority, that is, from the political institution authorized to take it; and second, that it does not violate a legal or moral norm. There can be no doubt that legitimacy is a vital thing to have, and illegitimacy a condition devoutly to be avoided.

Just as civilization itself is distinguished by the insistence that conflicts be settled by means other than brute force, so U.S. postwar leaders insisted that international relations be ordered by the same principle. This principle had all the more appeal because it was championed in circumstances in which, only a short time before, it had been blatantly violated. The old European order that perished in 1945 had begun its descent into oblivion and nihilism with the butchery of 1914 and with the declaration of Germany's then chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, that the treaty guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality was merely a "scrap of paper." It acted avowedly on the principle that might makes right.

I see a lot of Bethmann-Holweg's hubris in one John Bolton. Or one Mr. Wolfowitz who held the delusion that if only the US leads boldly, the rest of the world will follow, well, just like 'Operation Rose Petal', it didn't really come that way.

Despite the repeated avowals of U.S. leaders committing their country to the rule of law, some folks now claim that international law had little or nothing to do with the legitimacy accorded the United States after 1945. "It was not international law and institutions but the circumstances of the Cold War, and Washington's special role in it, that conferred legitimacy on the United States, at least within the West," wrote Robert Kagan. "Contrary to much mythologizing on both sides of the Atlantic these days, the foundations of U.S. legitimacy during the Cold War had little to do with the fact that the United States helped create the UN or faithfully abided by the precepts of international law laid out in the organization's charter." Washington reserved for itself, he maintains, the right to intervene "anywhere and everywhere."

These are convenient retrospective judgments regarding a state that now flouts principles it once held dear, but Kagan's position reflects a case of profound historical amnesia about the bases of U.S. internationalism.

The United States, to be sure, did not always scrupulously adhere to the rules of the charter in its conduct of diplomacy, as for instance when it quarantined Cuba to prevent the arrival of further Soviet nuclear armaments in 1962. But U.S. leaders generally made every effort to square their actions with international law. And despite some transgressions, the overall fidelity of the United States to internationalist norms contributed strongly to the legitimacy of U.S. power. The converse proposition-that world public opinion was reassured by illegal and aggressive U.S. actions, such as may have existed-would be absurd. This, clearly, is not what European leaders say now, and it is not what they thought then.

The startling loss of legitimacy that has occurred in the administration of President George W. Bush is not so mysterious. Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration revealed a deep suspicion of international law. Its undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, John Bolton, had noted in the late 1990s that "it is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so-because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States." This displays a fundamentally contemptuous attitude toward the principles that had previously sustained U.S. legitimacy.

It cannot be said, to be sure, that the Bush White House has been oblivious to the need for securing international legitimacy. By styling its doctrine of preventive war the "strategy of preemption," it sought to approximate its strategy to one of self-defense-for preemption, if the threat is imminent, can at least make a tolerable claim to legitimacy. This approach would have been unconvincing even if banned weapons had been found in Iraq-possessing weapons is not proof of impending attack-but it utterly collapsed when no weapons were discovered.
In truth, the Bush administration did not care a fig for whether the war was lawful. It wanted its strategy of preventive war to seem lawful, but the doctrine's implementation never depended on whether the administration's lawyers could write a coherent brief in its favor.

It is evident that the United States has reached a kind of tipping point, where world public opinion defines Washington as much, if not more, by the ease with which it justifies illegal actions as by its commitment to legality. The United States has assumed many of the very features of the "rogue nations" against which it has rhetorically-and sometimes literally-done battle over the years. The legitimacy of U.S. power has, at a minimum, been eroded significantly, and at certain moments-for instance, in the general revulsion to reports of widespread torture in Iraq-it seems to have vanished entirely.

And what about Gitmo? The U.S. administration wanted to deal with the post 911 world without POW status, frankly, with the gloves off, just for the convenience of not having to mess around with POW status and the like. They threw legitimacy over board for a short term gain of ‘freedom of action’.

Ultimately, however, the importance of legitimacy goes beyond its unquestionable utility. Certainly the leaders who earned the U.S. a reputation for legitimacy in the post-World War II era believed it to be a good in itself. For its own sake, and for the sake of a peaceful international order, the nation must find its way back to that conviction again.

[ May 30, 2005, 10:37: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

I agree with the folks who are saying that diplomacy is a better tool than war. This is true if the people you're talking with are rational! I believe most Muslims are rational.

The fringe militants aren't. Kim Il-Jong sure as hell isn't. So, to preserve some semblance of peace, we have to use different tactics. I do not think that the Americans want a lot of war -- it's bad for trade. They'd rather work with nations and sell them burgers than bomb them. But when a group of people have it as their raison d'etre to kill all Western infidels, there isn't much choice.

As for war in Europe, I think that the 2 world wars convinced the Europeans that war is just not a feasible option in the modern age. The presence of American military bases is merely a relic of those wars, but it may well serve to keep European powers from going at it as they did for several hundred years.

The smaller, newer states (note I don't say newer cultures, yes I know that the Islamics have been around for a thousand years) have not realized that war merely kills off the productive lifeblood of the society -- that being the 18 -- 30 demographic. These states would rather kill themselves, and innocents, then compromise and try to built a viable society.

Ragusa, you seem to believe that 9/11 doesn't matter, as only a few thousand people died. I simply cannot accept that. I also cannot accept the idea that we should not take the threat of terrorists seriously. Hiding our heads in the sand does not make a nuisance go away.

 

I think that the only reasons that the western european countries "tolerate" (sorry I couldn't find a better word) the presence of the american military bases after the extermination of the Soviet threat, are the rent that the US are paying for these bases and that these bases have become vital for local economies.

 

I think the people in charge did want war and that 9/11 presented an opportunity that otherwise would have been a hard sell. As George II loves to boast: "I'm a war president."