Stardate 20020812.1517

(On Screen): One issue which keeps being brought up in discussions about our decision whether to attack Iraq is the question of "international law". Those who raise it (who nearly always seem to oppose the war) contend that under "international law" the US doesn't have the "right" to attack Iraq because it hasn't satisfied the requirements of the law for doing so. The implication is that any discussions of potential danger Iraq represents to us are moot because it's illegal for us to do anything about it anyway.

Many who favor an attack tend to ignore the whole issue of international law, or to directly claim that there isn't any such thing. I myself don't believe in it, and I wrote about that a couple months ago within the context of discussions at the time about the International Criminal Court.

As some may have noticed, I've become engaged in a debate with my new-found friend Demosthenes on various subjects, and rather than trying to create single omnibus posts which respond to all the points he's made, I'm writing individual discussions on individual points. Yesterday I wrote about the issue of anonymity, and now I'm going to talk about international law. (I'm also trying to mix in other posts on other subjects for the benefit of any readers who might not be interested in my new friendship with Demosthenes.) In response to this post, I commented that I didn't discuss international law because I didn't think it was relevant to this discussion, in the associated comment thread. In the same comment thread, Demosthenes wrote as follows:

Which, Steven, is one of the reasons why I've been so highly critical of your arguments in that field. I'm a great admirer of Hobbes and think his conceptions of equality and the state of nature are incredibly important, but even I don't shut my eyes and pretend that international treaties and bodies don't exist.

Besides, it need not be framed as "law"- the word "law" is a mere simplification of the real concept of deals made and kept (or broken) between sovereign states. (It is that sovereignty that the "consent" you carried on about stems from.) International laws are laws because sovereign states agree that they will be so- but once that agreement is made, to try to revert to a Hobbesian state of nature because the agreement is a trade-off of one national interest for another is dangerous.

Then again, I've already covered all this. Many times. Since you didn't dispute it in this entry that was purportedly written to refute my critiques, I'll assume that either you either haven't read it, or have no way of disproving the hypothesis. (Considering that it's the bedrock of International Relations, I wouldn't be surprised.) You are free to believe what you wish, but I wouldn't suggest trying to derive wisdom from a lack of knowledge.

It's entirely possible that Demosthenes has written at greater depth about this in the past, but he offers no link and has no search engine and the only way I could find such a thing is to scan his entire archives, and I might not even recognize it when I found it. So for the moment this is the only thing I have of his on this to work with.

Demosthenes is not correct. The issue isn't being framed by its advocates as law merely as a simplification. That comment is a smoke screen. They've chosen the term carefully because of the connotations it carries, and when one thinks in terms of international relations as a series of simple agreements which are made (and broken) routinely on a basis of pure self interest, then it no longer looks like "law".

It's a common tactic to try to get people to use a certain term for something as a way of framing the conversation. One has a different attitude about "wetlands" than one does about "mosquito-infested swamps". Draining a swamp sounds like a good idea, but everyone knows we're supposed to preserve wetlands.

Those who are trying to frame this as a discussion of "international law" are doing so because they're trying to imply certain things about international relations by extrapolation from our experience with national law. Within our nation we agree to be bound by the law, even if it tells us we cannot do certain things we desire to do, and when we have disagreements with each other, we take them to court and plead them in front of a disinterested jury which makes a decision, after which both sides are bound by that decision.

By extrapolation, the rhetoric about "international law" is being used to imply that the US may not unilaterally attack Iraq unless it gains permission through some formal process of "international law", that to do so it must prove that Iraq was directly involved in either the September attack or in other direct attacks against us, using convincing evidence publicly presented, before the UN. Based on that presentation, the UN (probably the Security Council) will then serve the function of jury and decide if the US has made an adequate case, after which it will decide whether the US would be given the right to attack.

The idea of jury trial in our normal affairs is intended as a way of restraining people from creating their own justice,