So it WAS Illegal After All!

[Ion]

...
Sloppiness has nothing to do with education level.
...

I think sloppiness has lots to do with education.

 

[Ion]

You have to sink pretty damn low to call Ion's babbling a "challenge".

You have I.Q. problems in understanding what was posted, Baloney.

 

[Chaos]

May I add that there are many things, the grammar being the least obvious, that indicate that Tony is uneducated?

May I also add that I guess Ion is better in English than Tony is in any foreign language - and that he probably is better in his native language (Romanian, wasn´t it?) than Tony is in English?

And may I, at last, remind everybody that this topic is about the "War against Iraq - legal or illegal?" issue?

Thank you.

 

[Grammatron]

I think sloppiness has lots to do with education.

Aside from that fact that your opinion does not equal fact, you are forgoing a very important historical point. Sloppiness is why we have Penicillin today, unless of course you think it's a bad thing.

 

[Ion]

Gramma is awake now, and he is available to talk with anybody about Penicillin.

Meanwhile, the latest points that were made and are directly related to the thread, are here:

So you say yourself that the USA may ignore the rules, while others may not. How´s that for a double standard?

and

...
Also true, except that the rules of conduct were established because it was understood that settling international disputes via law is much more preferable to settling disputes via force. It may be expedient for the US to ignore the UN now, but what happens when the next big guys come along? Or when the US overstretches in attempting to enforce the Pax Americana?

 

[ssibal]

Re: Re: Re: So it WAS Illegal After All!

As long as the US and UK have veto power in the security council no-one will even try.

Well, then international law is meaningless so why would it manner if the U.S. broke these meaningless laws? You forget the General Assembly. What about Kofi Annan making some sort of statement? What about other member nations AT LEAST discussing the alleged illegality of the action in Iraq. None of this has happened, and I do not think it is because the whole world is so afraid of the big bad U.S..

 

[Ion]

Re: Re: Re: Re: So it WAS Illegal After All!

Well, then international law is meaningless so why would it manner if the U.S. broke these meaningless laws?
...

U.S. signed into the U.N. Chart.

Why?

1.) Because the "...international law is meaningless..."?

or is it

2.) because the "...international law..." should be meaningful and enforced by the most powerful member of the U.N. so that less powerful countries can see the example?

When U.S. signed with U.N., it was for 2.).

Not for 1.).

In Iraq however, U.S. acts like in 1.) and reneging 2.).

I would guess that if there is no mechanism to penalize U.S. reneging its signature because U.S. is in the Security Council, then there is a code of honor that U.S. is not living up to when it is reneging its own signature.

...
You forget the General Assembly. What about Kofi Annan making some sort of statement? What about other member nations AT LEAST discussing the alleged illegality of the action in Iraq. None of this has happened, and I do not think it is because the whole world is so afraid of the big bad U.S..

There are three possibilities:

A.) "...the whole world is so afraid of the big bad U.S..", indeed;
it doesn't give money and armies when Bush comes to U.N. for help like he did last month, but it "...is so afraid of the big bad U.S.." nonetheless;

B.) I posted a link in another thread ('So, France was RIGHT...?') yesterday, where it seems that the world is somewhat content that the oil from Iraq will get on the market in bigger quantities than Hussein (Iraq) was producing, even though countries that were getting deals on oil from Hussein got beat to it by Bush forcing the U.S. way into Iraq thru war;

C.) a combination of A.) and B.).

I vote for C.).

 

[peptoabysmal]

So you say yourself that the USA may ignore the rules, while others may not. How´s that for a double standard?

It is a standard that was agreed to by the founding members which include the UK and the USSR as well as the US and I think China and some others. I did not make up the rules.

Here is the statement of jurisdiction from the International Court

The jurisdiction of the Court in contentious proceedings is based on the consent of the States to which it is open. The form in which this consent is expressed determines the manner in which a case may be brought before the Court.
Link

Despite being a founding member of the UN, the US has retracted from any membership in the International Court. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand it makes the US look like it just goes along with the rules that serve it's interests and ignore the rest. On the other hand, this international court implies a global governmental structure and is very Socialist in that regard. We all know how well Socialist experiments turn out.

 

[Ion]

...
Despite being a founding member of the UN, the US has retracted from any membership in the International Court.
...

U.S. didn't retract from the U.N. Chart.

The U.S. signature there, is valid.

But reneged by U.S. under Bush.

That signature can be enforced by two means:

.) signing into the International Court, which U.S. under Bush avoided (but was accepted before Bush, by Clinton);

.) short of International Court, a code of honor in respecting its own signature.

 

[Tricky]

Reprint of Guardian article



I remember Tricky and other forum members endlessly arguing that the war was illegal, while others insisted otherwise. Well, now that Perle has finally come out in the open and admitted that international law just didn't suit the Bush administration, will these people finally concede the point? Or is it time to shift the goal posts?

I'm just getting back in here after a busy time, but I notice that I was cited as one who said the war was illegal. Hmmm... Maybe I did. I don't always remember what I said. However, I don't think that the illegality of the war was ever a big issue in my opposition to it. Being a realist, I know that "international law" is a very iffy thing, and carries little weight in any specific situation. International opinion, though, is quite important, and that was one very big reason why the war was a bad idea. Whether it was legal or not, the invasion has hurt the US badly and made enemies (or at least annoyees) of what had been our greatest allies. It has decimated the goodwill we had from 9-11 and drained our treasury. It has united the Arab world against us and sparked worldwide terrorism.

No, I don't really care that it was "illegal". It was stupid.

Stupid stupid stupid.

 

[sorgoth]

Tricky, I agree completely. Most of the world was on the US's good side after 9/11. Then, Bush attacked Iraq, and lost it all.

 

[peptoabysmal]

U.S. didn't retract from the U.N. Chart.

The U.S. signature there, is valid.

But reneged by U.S. under Bush.

That signature can be enforced by two means:

.) signing into the International Court, which U.S. under Bush avoided (but was accepted before Bush, by Clinton);

.) short of International Court, a code of honor in respecting its own signature.

The UN Charter is a good thing IMO. It is an amendable treaty, which provides a forum for international debate and cooperative action.

I remain unconvinced that the International Court is a good thing. It appears to me to have become a play for an international Socialist governing structure - a bad, bad thing.

 

[peptoabysmal]

Re: Re: So it WAS Illegal After All!

I'm just getting back in here after a busy time, but I notice that I was cited as one who said the war was illegal. Hmmm... Maybe I did. I don't always remember what I said. However, I don't think that the illegality of the war was ever a big issue in my opposition to it. Being a realist, I know that "international law" is a very iffy thing, and carries little weight in any specific situation. International opinion, though, is quite important, and that was one very big reason why the war was a bad idea. Whether it was legal or not, the invasion has hurt the US badly and made enemies (or at least annoyees) of what had been our greatest allies. It has decimated the goodwill we had from 9-11 and drained our treasury. It has united the Arab world against us and sparked worldwide terrorism.

No, I don't really care that it was "illegal". It was stupid.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Something is lacking in the reasoning of why the war supposedly turned world opinion against the US. This seems to be motivated more by a hatred of Bush than a disagreement with the need to remove Saddam from power. Does any reasonable person want Saddam back in power?

I am convinced that what many in the media are representing as "world opinion" is just a vocal minority of socialist rabble-rousers who push each other out of the way to get on TV. The vocal minority needs to shut the hell up.

When was this that the Arab world was on our side? Must have been before my time.

 

[Tricky]

Something is lacking in the reasoning of why the war supposedly turned world opinion against the US. This seems to be motivated more by a hatred of Bush than a disagreement with the need to remove Saddam from power. Does any reasonable person want Saddam back in power?

There might have been a fairly large number of anti-Bush people out there, especially those who favored the Kyoto accords, but I dont think there is any doubt that the Iraq invasion turned the majority of the world against the US. It is not that they thought Saddam was a great guy, but that the cure was worse than the disease. I'll bet that few outside of America would agree that the world is a better place now that Saddam is... well... missing.

I am convinced that what many in the media are representing as "world opinion" is just a vocal minority of socialist rabble-rousers who push each other out of the way to get on TV. The vocal minority needs to shut the hell up.

LOL. Yeah, I'll bet you are convinced of that. They're all just America haters who are out to get us. Got news for you, Pepe. The "minority of socialist rabble-rousers" are not a minority outside of your little gated community. The USA cannot behave like the 18th century monarchs in France and ignore the "rabble". Not if we want to keep our heads.

When was this that the Arab world was on our side? Must have been before my time.

It was after the 9-11 attacks. Practically every country in the world, including Arab ones, came out in support of the US. (It was in all the news.) Now I will not argue that some of them may have been making the obligatory "so sorry" statements and didn't really support the US, but that is more than we'd had for a while. There was also pretty much unilateral support for the effort to root the Taliban out of Afghanistan. That all disappeared when Bush decided to carry out his grudge against a country that was most decidely not involved with the 9-11 attacks. Of course, we could not count on the sympathy after 9-11 to last forever, but the rapidity with which that political capital was thrown away was startling by any standards.

---
edited to add..

By the way. What did happen to the Taliban? I hear they are still there and Afghanistan is still pretty much a hell hole. Is this how the US follows up on it's pledges? What makes you think they will do a better job in Iraq?

 

[Ziggurat]

There was also pretty much unilateral support for the effort to root the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

Do you mean unanimous? Because otherwise your statement doesn't make sense. If that's what you meant, your memory must be fuzzy. Foreign governments weren't generally opposed to our invasion of Afghanistan, since nobody was getting sweatheart deals for oil like the French and Russians with Saddam. But in case you forgot, plenty of people DID object to the invasion. There were all sorts of cries about how we'd turn in into a humanitarian crisis, with mass starvation, floods of refugees, etc. Of course, that didn't happen. Just like there weren't many refugees or cholera epidemics in Iraq, though such possibilities were also used to argue against our invasion there. The idea that we had unanimous support for Afghanistan is an illusion: we did not.

 

[Earthborn]

Despite being a founding member of the UN, the US has retracted from any membership in the International Court.

Are you sure you don't mix up the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court?

On the other hand, this international court implies a global governmental structure and is very Socialist in that regard.

Can you explain what is 'socialist' about it? Are there any socialist countries that are member states? Is it in any surprising that in this globalising world, there need to be structures to settle disputes between states (ICJ) or be able to prosecute criminals that act (in horrible ways) above the law in their own country (ICC) ?

 

[Tony]

May I add that there are many things, the grammar being the least obvious, that indicate that Tony is uneducated?

Like what? Please share one of these "many" things.

 

[peptoabysmal]

There might have been a fairly large number of anti-Bush people out there, especially those who favored the Kyoto accords, but I dont think there is any doubt that the Iraq invasion turned the majority of the world against the US. It is not that they thought Saddam was a great guy, but that the cure was worse than the disease. I'll bet that few outside of America would agree that the world is a better place now that Saddam is... well... missing.

I think your view only extends to Europe. Most of the world hates us and always has and always will. I think that when all of this is over the Europeans will come around and realize that we are trying to do some good and some things are just beyond our control. Time will tell.

LOL. Yeah, I'll bet you are convinced of that. They're all just America haters who are out to get us. Got news for you, Pepe. The "minority of socialist rabble-rousers" are not a minority outside of your little gated community. The USA cannot behave like the 18th century monarchs in France and ignore the "rabble". Not if we want to keep our heads.

Just noise, not numbers. You don't actually believe those Internet polls, do you? Too bad you are an agoraphobic who spends all of his time posting on left wing message boards, you need to get out more.

It was after the 9-11 attacks. Practically every country in the world, including Arab ones, came out in support of the US. (It was in all the news.) Now I will not argue that some of them may have been making the obligatory "so sorry" statements and didn't really support the US, but that is more than we'd had for a while. There was also pretty much unilateral support for the effort to root the Taliban out of Afghanistan. That all disappeared when Bush decided to carry out his grudge against a country that was most decidely not involved with the 9-11 attacks. Of course, we could not count on the sympathy after 9-11 to last forever, but the rapidity with which that political capital was thrown away was startling by any standards.

You should read this:
Case Closed
Note:
The Pentagon has stated that this leaked document is in "raw form" and therefore not accurate. It can't be all wrong, or there wouldn’t be any purpose to the document, would there?

Besides, it's common knowledge that Saddam supported Abu Nidal and others. We are at war with all Islamic-based terrorism, not just Al-Q.

It cracks me up when people call the war with Iraq a "pre-emptive strike". The first war was never officially over, we were in cease-fire mode and Saddam was not living up to his end of the treaty. What is so hard to understand about that?

---
edited to add..

By the way. What did happen to the Taliban? I hear they are still there and Afghanistan is still pretty much a hell hole. Is this how the US follows up on it's pledges? What makes you think they will do a better job in Iraq?

And you were expecting exactly what from a country who's GNP is Opium? When does any of the responsibility of rebuilding a country fall on the citizens of that country? All we can really do is provide military cover fire, financial backing and construction equipment. The rest is up to the Afghans. I do believe that it was over-extending our Clinton-ravaged military to go to war with Iraq so soon after Afghanistan. Nevertheless, it was something that was going to have to be done sooner or later.

 

[Frank Newgent]

You should read this:
Case Closed

Ditto

The memo in question was written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith for Senators Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It lays out fifty pieces of evidence suggesting contacts between Iraq and Iraqis and members of Al Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden (Hayes prints a substantial fraction of the numbered points, but not the entire memo).

The memo does provide evidence of several meetings between Iraqi agents and members of Al Qaeda, including several meetings between Iraqi intelligence officials and members of Al Qaeda, mostly between 1992 and 1998. The memo also includes evidence of an agreement between Iraq and Al Qaeda not to take action against one another.

Yet many of the memo's pieces of evidence come with caveats. For example, in regard to several meetings, the memo states that "None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings" (which are obviously crucial to establishing an "operational relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda). Other evidence is indirect, such as a note that "According to sensitive CIA reporting, . . . the Saudi National Guard went on a kingdom-wide state of alert in late Dec 2000 after learning Saddam agreed to assist Al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia." (ellipsis in Hayes article).

The memo also details the actions of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi living in Malaysia. Yet the only documented contact between Shakir and the Iraqi government is Shakir's own claim that he obtained a job at an airport "through an Iraqi embassy employee." And regarding the controversial meeting between Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague, the memo substantiates two meetings (one in December 1994 and one in June 2000) but notes that evidence surrounding two others, including one in April 2001 that has been cited by Bush administration officials, "is complicated and sometimes contradictory".

The connections reported between Iraq and Al Qaeda after Sept. 11, 2001 are also vague and far from conclusive. They include an alleged offer of safe haven in Iraq to Al Qaeda members, the provision of weapons to "Al Qaeda members in northern Iraq" beginning in "mid-March," roughly the time of the beginning of US military action; and assistance provided by an Iraqi intelligence agent to Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda-affiliated group which operated prior to the war in Kurdish-controlled northeastern Iraq.

Moreover, there are questions about the reliability of the information contained in the memo. The Defense Department released a statement which describes "[t]he items listed in the [memo]" as "either raw reports or products of the CIA, the National Security Agency or, in one case, the Defense Intelligence Agency," and says that the memo "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions." (According to reports, the classified version of the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 also indicated that those contacts had not precipitated any lasting relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda.)

As Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have pointed out, the memo also omits evidence that casts doubt on some of its claims. For example, while the memo details a meeting between Iraqi intelligence officer Farouk Hijazi, Isikoff and Hosenball note that "as Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official, says, the Feith-Carney memo omits the rest of the story: that bin Laden actually rejected the Hijazi overture, concluding he did not want to be 'exploited' by a regime that he has consistently viewed as 'secular' and fundamentally antithetical to his vision of a strict Islamic state." Regarding the alleged April 2001 meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent, "the Iraqi agent in question, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, has been in U.S. custody for months and, according to U.S. intelligence sources, denies ever meeting Atta."

In short, the evidence remains contested, and the memo itself does not demonstrate the sort of high-level coordination between Iraq and Al Qaeda implied by phrases such as "operational relationship."

Yet several pundits have implied that the memo documents such a connection, often including the suggestion that the memo justifies military action in Iraq. Former CIA director James Woolsey was one of the first, suggesting on CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" on the 14th that "Anybody who says there is no working relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraqi intelligence going back to the early '90s--they can only say that if they're illiterate. This is a slam dunk."

Others suggested some sort of personal link between Saddam and Bin Laden (which nothing in the memo supports). On the 17th, Rush Limbaugh trumpeted the article on his radio show (Windows Media Audio), claiming that "It says what I have suspected all along... And that is that there's been a tie, a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda dating back all the way to the early 90s, particularly Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein." The New York Post editorial board also weighed in on the 17th with the suggestion that the Hayes article "documents an even more profound linkage: between none other than Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden." It continues, "The memo provides enormous evidence that the Bush team was right all along about Saddam's terrorist ties - despite charges to the contrary by the president's foes, particularly Democrats."

Syndicated columnist Frank Gaffney overstated the implications of the memo in a slightly different way last Monday, suggesting that "Saddam Hussein's regime had been guilty as charged – tied for over a decade to Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network (among other terrorist groups) for the purpose of waging attacks on their mutual foe, the United States." The memo simply decribes evidence linking Iraq and Al Qaeda – it does not suggest that the purpose of the relationship was to wage attacks specifically on the United States.

On October 21st, Oliver North took the spin a step further, quoting Hayes and then suggesting that "(I)n their attempt to continue to undermine the president, the media is largely ignoring this memo -- and the few that are reporting on it have cast doubts about its contents."

Using randomly picked letters from my desk calendar of .043's verbal blunders I have constructed an anagram illustrating the operational confabulation of the current administration: "Why should I let contradictions of reality diminish the expression of untruth so grounded in firm metaphysical principle?"

 

[Graham]

I think your view only extends to Europe. Most of the world hates us and always has and always will.

Sure they do Pepto . . . I bet they're putting something in your water too.

Maybe you should line your hat with tinfoil to keep the rays out . . .

Seriously.