Stardate 20030403.2203

(On Screen): There's a smart-ass comment that engineers sometimes use. When hearing someone emphatically declare, "We can't do that!" someone else may reply, in exasperation, "Why not? Does it violate the laws of physics?"

We can't go faster than light. We can't violate the second law of thermodynamics. These are hard and fast restrictions imposed on us by the Universe; it isn't possible for us to fail to comply with these laws. But for lesser issues, it's not so clear.

There are some who have enormous faith in the power of law. Not the laws of physics, mind, but the laws of man. But in a sense they seem to conflate the two, and for some reason I've never understood seem to think that if you pass a law against something-or-other, then mysterious forces will transform space-time and thereafter whatever-it-was will cease to happen, because it will be impossible.

Advanced practitioners of this principle have perfected an even more sophisticated version of this approach: they don't even need to formally pass laws. What they do is talk about "emerging international law", which sort of spontaneously springs out of nowhere, and once it's in being, the fabric of the universe is modified.

For months we heard, "You American's can't go to war in Iraq without UN approval." Of course, that was part-and-parcel of a modern repackaging of Catch 22:

1. You can't fight a war without dealing with the UN first.
2. If you deal with the UN, then it means that there's still a remote chance that diplomacy may still work, and you can't have permission to go to war as long as there's even the faintest hope that a diplomatic solution is possible.

Eventually, Bush and Blair got fed up, and they went to war anyway. Fortunately for us, doing so didn't violate the laws of physics. If you try to violate the second law of thermodynamics, you'll fail. That's all.

But we seem to not only be fighting a war in Iraq, but also seem to be winning it. (So far, so good.) It's always good to have a field test occasionally of a new scientific theory, and we seem to be proving that "emerging international law" doesn't have the same power as the laws of physics.

And we're about to prove that again. We can't fight a war without UN approval, and the US can't be primarily in charge of the post-war rebuilding of Iraq. The UN must approve all wars, and the rebuilding of Iraq must be under UN control.

Or so we're being told.

These comments are coming from a lot of places, and the arguments take multiple forms. For example, someone named Mark Malloch Brown, from the UN:

A U.S.-run administration in Iraq will not have the authority under international law to award American companies major contracts to modernize and run Iraq's vast oil industry, a senior U.N. official said Thursday.

Under the Geneva Conventions, an occupying power can only deal with day-to-day administrative operations unless the U.N. Security Council decides otherwise, said Mark Malloch Brown, administrator of the United Nations Development Program.

"Until there is a new Security Council resolution, you are only as the occupying power able to deal with day-to-day administrative decisions," Malloch Brown said. An occupier cannot change the constitution or make long-term legal commitments such as the kind of 10- to 20-year contracts and concessions that oil developers need, he said.

Now I know that I cannot change the value of the universal electrical constant, but I was not aware that it was impossible for me, or for my nation, to "change the constitution" of Iraq.

Philip Carroll, who was president and chief executive of the U.S. arm of the London-based Royal Dutch/Shell Group until 1998 told the Houston Chronicle Thursday that he had been asked to restore oil production and create new production capacity if needed.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday that the United States not the United Nations must have the lead role in Iraq's postwar reconstruction.

Senior U.S. officials have said they expect revenue from Iraqi oil to cover much of the cost of postwar reconstruction. Iraq's oil, however, is currently sold under the U.N. oil-for-food program, which is controlled by the Security Council.

Any change to divert money to reconstruction or reward U.S. companies would almost certainly face stiff opposition from France, Russia, Germany and China, which opposed the U.S. resolution seeking authorization from the Security Council for war.

There was also stiff opposition to us fighting the war in the first place, as this article mentions, and we're fighting anyway.

Suppose that we ignore the UN. Suppose that we run Iraq for a year or two with a military government. Suppose that we and the Brits and Aussies supervise the process of a gradual transition to civilian rule. Suppose that we operate the oil fields, and pump the oil into ships we control and haul the oil out and sell it on the world market, or sell it to ourselves at a fair market price, and take the money and use it to rebuild Iraq.

What in hell is the UN going to do about it? What I just described is not, in fact, physically impossible. It's entirely prac