Quote:And, the Security Council was given the opportunity to follow through with their vague threat, and it turned out to be empty.
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.
[/quote]Every sovereign nation has the right to decide its own actions, and to what extent another nation has become a threat, and how their nation will respond to that threat. [/quote]
If this were true, then there has not been an illegitimate war declared by a nation in 7000 years of organized warfare.
Quote:Contrary to what some in the world would believe, the nations of the world are not subservient to the UN.
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.
Quote:But, you cannot say that Iraq wasn't given an opportunity to reform.
They were told they had to eliminate their WMD programs, and allow inspections to demonstrate that. 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?
Quote:Iraq was negotiating and providing aid directly to Ansar Al Islam, an affiliate of our sworn enemy and many other terrorist organizations.
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.
Quote:Iraq was suspected of stockpiling proscribed weapons materials and harassed and blocked attempts by the UNSCOM to discover the truth, leading people to believe such weapons existed.
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.
Quote:War means horror, both during and after. When we get to the point where war is authorized or encouraged by committee's of bureaucrats, then the world will become a seriously dangerous place.
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."
I will deal with the Just War tenets in another post. They are very interesting, and I think I am in agreement with them.
-Jester