So, when you get to the phrase "toxic depleted uranium," you know these lawyers are idiots or shysters, professors and "experts" or no.

These arguments leave me cold because I don't believe in international law. I don't care whether Blair violated it or not.

Otherwise, as Orrin says.

Yesterday, I went to a lecture on "Libricide" (neologism meaning doing to books and libraries what we usually do to people), where the "destruction" of the Iraqi museums came up in the question period.

The discussion (everybody there but me was a librarian) was unusually nuanced. The book's author, Rebecca Knuth of the U. of Hawaii, is a supporter of the war in Iraq, but at the same time she offered that she has been mulling over an idea that when nations go "resort to aggression" they should be required, by international law, not just to take steps to restore order once the fighting is done but to (if I understood her aright) design campaigns so that books don't get hurt.

I completely disagree. The policy of sparing Paris and Rome from bombing during World War II because of their cultural treasures was the one indubitably immoral decision of an otherwise morally ambiguous aerial bombing campaign.

So there. Orrin, you might like to review her book. Just out from Prager.

Harry:

Don't bombing studies uniformly show that the indiscriminate destruction of cities is counterproductive?

I agree with her, but I'd use the neutron bomb.

Libricide? If a Democratic President had invaded Iraq, dollars to doughnuts your meeting would not have taken place.

I've had my shower but it's still way too early in the morning for me.

Kindly explain why not bombing Paris and Rome during WWII were "indubitably immoral" decisions.

Because that risked prolonging the war and was hypocritical given how cities like Dresden were wiped off the map?

Possibly; but then Paris and Rome were occupied cities.

Dresden was not (unless one subscribes to the increasingly popular view that all of Germany was occupied by this fiendish, alien Nazi cult, which victimized all Germans, along with a few other groups...).

Correction. Paris was occupied, but Rome was part of the Axis countries, I suppose one could claim, at least until 1943.

Still, Rome? Rome....

Harry

That is absurd. Quite apart from the fact I've never heard anyone allege bombing Paris and Rome would have been strategically advantageous, you don't bomb your allied civilian populations without being driven by absolute necessity. What Italian and French cities of little cultural significance were bombed?

And Monte Cassino was bombed to smithereens despite Vatican pleas to save its treasures.

Also, international law is a great thing when it is grounded in political morality and a realisitc view of how humans and nations act. How can anyone be against international law per se? The problem is the capture of the field by European and American leftist academics and the use of it for political ends by Europe and the UN. Time to rescue it, not abandon it.

Peter - I can be against international law because law implies authority and sovereignty, and I don't want an international population exercising sovereignty over me (my fellow Americans are bad enough).

PJ

No, international law implies commonly accepted and agreed to norms of behaviour between nations as an incident of being a nation. It doesn't or shouldn't imply involuntary restrictions on sovereignty by virtue of being outvoted by savages. It is a code of conduct, expectation, cooperation and conflict, not a supra-national authority.

Then call it international norms, not international law. The trouble is that many jurists in the U.S., even perhaps some on the Supreme Court, would like to treat international law as a source of domestic law, imposed on the nation by the "Constitution."

What is forgotten by the proponents of international law is that there is no authority without power. Unenforceable authority is no authority. Where is the ICC's army?

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter XIII:

"But though there had never been any time wherein particular men were in a condition of war one against another, yet in all times kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators, having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another; that is, their forts, garrisons, and guns upon the frontiers of their kingdoms, and continual spies upon their neighbours, which is a posture of war. . .

To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. . . It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it."

Great, so the spoils of the high seas should go to the guys with the biggest, fastest fishing fleets and damn the Geneva convention on the treatment of prisoners?

The fish are gone anyway and prisoners routinely mistreated.

Now there is the cheery thought for the day.

Overfishing would end in one day if the US Navy suddenly had a few free hours of target practice. But international law, which supposedly protects the fish, gets in the way. Oh well....

PJ

Yes, that may be a problem, but surely the solution is to improve the quality of judges, not dispense with bodies of law. In both our countires judges are making a hash of the constitution, but no one I know is arguing for repeal.

Look, international law is like aboriginal rights--a good and useful concept of great practical use which has become politicized beyond intelligibility, common sense or the good of civilization. Mainly because conservatives were asleep on the watch.