And so international law was cut down to get at the supposed Milosevic devil, and the winds are starting to blow strong.
john mage
New York Times
Annan Says U.S. Will Violate Charter if It Acts Without Approval By PATRICK E. TYLER and FELICITY BARRINGER
UNITED NATIONS, March 10 — Secretary General Kofi Annan warned today that if the United States fails to win approval from the Security Council for an attack on Iraq, Washington's decision to act alone or outside the Council would violate the United Nations charter. "The members of the Security Council now face a great choice," Mr. Annan said in The Hague, where he was trying to broker a United Nations deal on Cyprus. "If they fail to agree on a common position and action is taken without the authority of the Security Council, the legitimacy and support for any such action will be seriously impaired."
Mr. Annan's remarks drew a sharp response from Washington, where the Bush administration, like its allies overseas, was engaged in a strong lobbying effort to win the necessary nine votes to pass a resolution this week authorizing war.
The White House spokesman Ari Fleischer in a strongly worded retort said that "from a moral point of view," if the United Nations fails to support the Bush administration's war aims, it will have "failed to act once again," as it did in Kosovo in the face of persecution of the ethnic Albanians by Serbia ...
Professor Wedgewood [they misspelled her married name - Ruth Glushien Wedgwood has never publicly opposed *anything* the U.S. has ever done. Bizarrely the NYTimes does not mention that she is the US member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, where Ruth's duties include the justification of torture, the denial of counsel, imprisonment without trial etc. etc. - JM] said that even if the United States loses the final vote and proceeds to war, "the failure of this particular resolution" does "not obviate the prior ones," especially since the prior resolutions gave the United States and its allies special authority to disarm Iraq for the sake of the peace and security of the region.
The main point, she said, "is that we've been there before." She cited the case of Kosovo, when the Clinton administration bypassed the Security Council — where Russia was threatening to veto any military action — and used NATO as its instrument to lead the bombing of Yugoslavia...