The Iraq War retrospective Thread

[kandrathe]

And so what, the power then devolves to whomever wants to claim it? I don't recall that part of the charter. Could Iran have enforced 1441? Could Israel? Or does the US have some special aura that makes it the only one who decides these things? This is pure vigilantism. The enforcement body decided on its course of action, the US didn't like it, and so broke the law to get its way. Not a tough legal issue.

In terms of War, yes, any nation who felt justly threatened by Iraq, and who had the means to successfully prosecute and win the war would be "Justly" authorized to engage in the war. You seem to ascribe to the UN some hierarchy of authority that does not exist.

If this were true, then there has not been an illegitimate war declared by a nation in 7000 years of organized warfare.

Probably not, and you probably know this is an exaggeration.

In matters of war, nations are subservient to the UN if they want to follow the rule of international law. If they'd rather become rogue vigilante states, then no, I guess they aren't.

Again, no state is subservient to the UN. Every state is given the right to its own sovereignty. The UN acts as a means for political dialog. One prerequisite for the modern "Just War" is to present your case to the UNSC, but because it is a political body the failure to get UN authorization for your war would not automatically mean your war was unjust.

Those inspections, still going on when the US torpedoed them by invading, turned up nothing at all. Post-war intelligence overwhelmingly indicates that Iraq had no functioning WMD programs, nor WMD stockpiles. What "reform" did Iraq fail to make that was necessary?

By thwarting UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, a definate answer of "did they" or "didn't they" was not possible allowing for the fear of "did they" to win over. Had Iraq wanted to prevent the war, they merely had to aid the actions of UNSCOM and UNMOVIC to verify completely that they "DID NOT" have anything. But, the best anyone could come up with was "maybe not".

Once again, this claim pops up about Ansar Al-Islam. Do I have to play whackamole with this yet again? Show me something real about this claim, or abandon it.

How about from George Tenet,
"Ansar al-Islam, a radical Kurdish Islamic group, was closely allied to al-Qa'ida. Kurdish Islamists and al-Qa'ida had come together in the summer of 2000 to create a safe haven for al-Qa'ida in an area of northeastern Iraq not under Iraqi government control, in the event Afghanistan was lost as a sanctuary. The area subsequently became a hub for al-Qa'ida operations. We believed that up to two hundred al-Qa'ida fighters began to relocate there in camps after the Afghan campaign began in the fall of 2001. The camps enhanced Zarqawi's reach beyond the Middle East. One of the camps run by AI, known as Kurmal, engaged in production and training in the use of low-level poisons such as cyanide. We had intelligence telling us that Zarqawi's men had tested these poisons on animals and, in at least one case, on one of their own associates. They laughed about how well it worked. Our efforts to track activities emanating from Kurmal resulted in the arrest of nearly one hundred Zarqawi operatives in Western Europe planning to use poisons in operations. What was even more worrisome was that by the spring and summer of 2002, more than a dozen al-Qa'ida-affiliated extremists converged on Baghdad, with apparently no harassment on the part of the Iraqi government. They had found a comfortable and secure environment in which they moved people and supplies to support Zarqawi's operations in northeastern Iraq... Do we know just how aware Iraqi authorities were of these terrorists' presence either in Baghdad or northeastern Iraq? No, but from an intelligence point of view it would have been difficult to conclude that the Iraqi intelligence service was not aware of their activities. Certainly, we believe that at least one senior AI operative maintained some sort of liaison relationship with the Iraqis. But operational direction and control? No." -- "At the Center of the Storm: My years at the CIA", Harper Collins, p. 350-351. You refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming truth of the connection here.

And some other people, in their irritating sanity, insisted that evidence be given for this point that wasn't full of holes. None was forthcoming, and the only program that might have theoretically provided it was derided as the inneffectual bungling of "Hans Blinx." Such nattering nabobs of negativity also happened to have Security Council vetos, making it rather necessary to satisfy them before going to war.

Again, no, the burden of proof was on Iraq, not for Hans Blix to find something. In this case, Iraq failed to convince the US that there was no WMD programs, because the accounting fell short.

The Security Council is a group of nations, many of them the most poweful in the world, getting together to decide collective security matters. It is hardly a "committee of bureaucrats."

The UN, and even the UNSC is a political body and has no power, other than when collective agreement including all the "veto" nations. This means in 99% of all action set before them, the most common response will be to do nothing.