>It would be a tremendous disservice to the left forces of the world for
National Lawyers Guild
>and other left lawyers to fail to make all of the important legal arguments
that the U.S.
>action violates both domestic U.S. law and international law.
>The UN Charter prohibits waging war except in self-defense. Again the
nation
>of Afghanistan did not attack the U.S. The harboring of criminals is
properly dealt
>with through extradition, not waging war on the nation in which the
criminals reside.
>Left lawyer should be raising these arguments, and should not surrender
this issue
>as Nathan gives up. The NLG would not be proud of you.
Without question, many/most in the NLG buy this "illegal war" approach to the law, but I side with an earlier generation of left lawyers, the legal realists, in believing the law is not what academics might wish, but what the law is in practice. And the United Nations has sanctioned a wide array of wars with quite flexible definitions of "self defense."
I don't believe in a platonic "Law" that exists abstractly but nowhere in practice.
There are many things that are legal, which I oppose. And many which are illegal which I support. The Gulf War was sanctioned by every measure of international law, yet I think it was wrong.
Whether a war is legal or illegal is a matter of relative indifference to me in a world of international inequity and violence, where those deciding the "legality" of violence are largely those with the biggest guns.
The only issue is whether a particular conflict is fought for moral and just goals, with a reasonable likelihood of success in those goals. Most wars fail that test. The Kosovo intervention was the only largescale conflict by the US that has met that standard for me in my lifetime.
The obsession of left lawyers with "legality" is in my mind a degeneration of a once proud tradition that questioned the war positivism of legal power in the world, which sought to replace the question of what is legal with what is just. The latter question of justice is the only one that matters. The rule of law may often serve justice, but it is a tool of the latter, never its master.
-- Nathan Newman