Nathan Newman wrote:
>That kind of national sovereignty argument is just Bull Connor/Pat Buchanan
>states rights rhetoric taken to the global level as its logical end point.
-Oh yeah, I forgot to say - your insistence on this as a precedent is -pretty weird. The Southern states are part of the U.S., ultimately -under the authority of the federal government. They lost a Civil War -fought over these sort of issues.
And Iraq is ultimately under the authority of the United Nations Charter and national security council. You oddly reflect the Americanist assumption that "national sovereignty" is fully preserved despite a nation signing the United Nations treaty.
The large degree of sovereignty granted individual US states under Supreme Court precedents (Cruikshank, Reese, Civil Rights Cases, Plessy) was actually clearer until 1954 (and getting muddier with Morrison and other recent states rights decisions) than the amount of ultimate sovereignty granted individual nations under the UN charter.
I just don't buy any of this national sovereignty crap whether in the US "states rights" tradition or the conservative neo-realist or left "self-determination" versions. There are good arguments that war is a bad method of solving conflict but that is based on the immorality of killing innocents, not on some fetishization of geographic lines on the ground that are all the legacy of past colonialism and murderous wars. Why I should respect the lines of yesterday's imperialism is beyond me.
-- Nathan Newman