MrSinatra;357815 Wrote: > tell me, whats a "legal" war? That was probably a hypothetical question, but here's a real although greatly simplified answer. "International law" is comprised of treaties signed by various countries around the world. Basically if a country signs a treaty promising not do perform action X, and then they perform action X anyway, then action X is a violation of the treaty, and illegal. I don't like the term "international law" myself because it creates the impression that this law is being imposed on nations from some outside entity like the UN, and that's not really true.
The UN Charter, for example, is actually a treaty (which the US has signed), and part of that treaty is that member states agree not to engage in military aggression without first getting UN approval. So to answer your questions, defensive wars are one sort of legal war. If Iraq attacked the US, the US would be totally within their rights to fight back. So US military action in that hypothetical war would be legal and Iraqi military action would be illegal, because the Iraqis were the aggressors. Now, if Iraq managed to convince the UN Security Council that the US posed a threat to the world community, or presented some sort of looming humanitarian disaster, they could attack the US once they had a UN resolution authorizing the attack, and that would also be legal. There are some other cases involving coming to the aid of an ally that's been attacked, etc, but that's the general gist of it. So with regard to the most recent war between the US and Iraq, only half of that war was truly illegal. The US attack was not authorized by the UN, and therefore violated a treaty and was illegal. The Iraqis, however, were (and still are) fully within their rights to defend their country against the country that invaded them. This if why Kofi Annan, the current US-backed Secretary General of the UN, considered the invasion to be illegal. Hope that helps. Now, there are some other angles on this, such as the complete lack of any consistent enforcement mechanism--which leads to justifiable accusations of case-by-case hypocrisy. We've also gotten UN approval in the past (for the Korean War) when it wasn't necessary, creating an impression that UN approval is needed for all wars (it isn't). There are also many conservatives who think the US should withdraw from the UN, and if that were the case then maybe we could attack whoever we wanted legally (I doubt it--there are still lots of treaties out there). So in simplified terms, the US broke a treaty. News at 11 ;) -- CatBus ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CatBus's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=7461 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=54678 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
