Iraq and legality again Re: [extropy-chat] Professor Being Sued Over Anti-Aging Comments

[giorgio gaviraghi]

when the US invaded Panama to get hold of Noriega,
nobody said a word
With Saddam is the same case with the only difference
that the situation  was badly mismanaged and went out
of control
In neither cases the US had any right to intervene but
they did.
This time something went wrong and the Us don't know
how to leave and save face, leaving the existing
government to face another fall of saigon event

--- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> ha scritto: 

> --- Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> > The tragedy of Iraq was that it shows the level of
> > thinking
> > that we (humans) were capable of through our
> institutions.
> 
> Would it be accurate to restate this as follows?
> 
> The problem was that the only legal course of
> action, was to allow
> Saddam to continue his butchery.  Almost any student
> of history can
> cite the long list of problems that can arise when
> we allow powerful
> people, like the US President, to discard the law
> whenever they find it
> convenient, even if only for the noblest of
> intentions.  Indeed, "rule
> by personal whim" may well describe the root of the
> problems with
> Saddam's government.  However, that discarding is
> exactly what happened
> in this case, when we intervened.  The problem,
> therefore, is in the
> precedent for abuse that this sets up, the future
> cost of which may
> well exceed the lives that were saved by this
> action...and in the fact
> that we could find no way to stop Saddam while still
> maintaining
> legality.
> 
> (In fact, such a way may have arisen, had Bush stuck
> with the UN
> negotiations just a bit longer.  As was pointed out
> at the time, with
> Chirac threatening to veto any UN-sanctioned
> military action, Bush
> just needed to get on record that said veto would
> happen no matter what
> evidence Bush supplied - at the time, Chirac was not
> yet contesting the
> evidence's veracity, so the fact that it now seems
> to have been
> manufactured was irrelevant at the time - and then
> cite the UN's
> charter, cite that France's veto placed the UN in
> abeyance of its own
> charter, and thus show that the UN was itself
> breaking its own laws.
> Bush would then have been in a position to legally
> invade Iraq, to
> enforce the pledges it had made to the UN, even over
> the UN's official
> protest.
> 
> Iraq would have been invaded in the end either way. 
> Anyone who does
> not see a significant difference between this
> scenario and what
> actually happened, is failing to understand what is
> actually being
> objected to.)
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