> Nathan Newman wrote:
> >As far as the South was concerned, the North had as much right to send in
> >troops as the UN has to send troops into Iraq.
>
> Eh? They lost the Civil War. Federal authority won. What "the South"
> thought wasn't worth a hill of beans.
Actually for seventy years from 1875 until the 1940s, what the South mattered a lot since their viewpoints dominated the Supreme Court's constitutional ruling and Congressional legislative agenda. The "right" to segregation under the Constitution had been upheld by the Supreme Court; in fact, Congressional power to stop it had been explicitly struck down in 1883 by that same Supreme Court.
It is as reasonable to say that the "United Nations" won World War II. Collective security won and individual nationalism lost. At present, the interesting international constitutional debate is not over whether Iraq has unlimited sovereignty within its borders, since it definitely does not, but only what procedures are required for collective security to be invoked.
Now I'm a bit of a skeptic on international law as well, which is why I return to the moral and pragmatic issues involved and find the legalistic pronouncements rather irrelevant.
>Iraq is a sovereign country,
> not a region of the U.S. Of course you don't really believe this, but
> you backed yourself into a corner, and now you're trying hard to
> describe it as roomy and with excellent views.
I don't believe in simple "sovereignty" or "self-determination"-- I've repeatedly over the years stated as such. I am an internationalist and a democrat, small d, and the only role for local sovereignty is as a unit of democratic decision-making. Absent that democratic decision-making and I think "sovereignty" rhetoric is irrelevant, period. Saddam Hussein as an individual has no claims to sovereignty on behalf of an oppressed people in order to further oppress them-- that is a macabre twisting of the authority of sovereignty.
My arguments against the Iraq war are only that I think the likely results, especially as conducted by Bush, would be unlikely to deliver democracy to its people and the likely result in the general middle east population would be a backlash against the US that would endanger our lives. But in the hypothetical of Saddam being deposed and replaced by a democratic system with others cheering on from the region-- I'd support that intervention easily. Not going to happen, but as I've stated, that's an empirical debate I have with pro-war friends, not a moral debate.
-- Nathan Newman