GOOD NEWS FOR TYRANTS:

Report: Humanitarian reasons didn't justify Iraq war: Human Rights Watch dismisses one of the Bush administration's main arguments for the invasion. (Matthew Clark, January 27, 2004, csmonitor.com)

As the months roll by without any discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Bush administration has increasingly emphasized Saddam Hussein's brutality and human rights violations as an important justification for the preemptive war it launched to overthrow his regime. After former chief US weapons inspector David Kay announced over the weekend that Iraq did not possess any WMD stockpiles before the war, the White House has backed off the claim that had been its main justification for the war.

But a leading advocacy group, Human Rights Watch (HRW), released a report Monday challenging the administration's other main justification. The report said that the war in Iraq should not be justified as a defense of human rights. In its annual report, the independent, nongovernmental organization argues that, because there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing when the conflict began, the war was not necessary to stop such atrocities.

"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair," said Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director. The mass killing of Kurds in 1988 (often cited by US President George W. Bush) would have justified humanitarian intervention, Mr. Roth said.

"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he said. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."

Reflexive opposition to America and to war has made a lot of folks on the Left say a lot off stupid things, but a purported human rights organization suggesting that a genocidal dictatorship need only pause in its killing in order to make its sovereignty inviolable has to take the cake.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 27, 2004 3:17 PM