Mr. O’Neill<\/a> makes an excellent point. Though I must admit that I myself
\nsometimes became caught up in what Blix said or didn’t say as some kind of
\nevidence in the argument over the war itself, the regime of weapons inspections in
\nconcert with the regular bombing of Iraq during the 1990s was always morally
\nindefensible and senseless as a matter of policy. Such a regime presupposed that
\none nation alone was punishable for such proliferation, and that this nation could
\nhave no legitimate security claims for the development of unconventional weapons. I
\nsubmit that if Israel had been so singled out, the outrage in America at the hostility to
\na single country would have been overwhelming. Yet this singling out of a single
\ncountry for a “crime” committed by half a dozen, if not many more, states was Iraq
\npolicy since 1991. Supposedly, because Iraq was once an aggressor, its rights were
\nnull and void in perpetuity, but one imagines that such a standard, if taken universally,
\nmight make Israel’s life rather difficult in light of the campaigns 1967 and certainly
\nthat of 1982.<\/i>
\n <\/p>\n[i]As one of those “extreme right-wing state sovereigntists,” as I was once called, I
\nconsidered the total violation of Iraqi sovereignty by these inspections and the
\nviolence used to back them up to be immeasurably worse in principle than anything
\nimposed on the Germans by the Carthaginian peace of 1919. The Germans were
\ncertainly among the first to start that war, and yet their territory was never violated so
\ncompletely or their rights dismissed so summarily as was the case with Iraq. The
\nU.N., and France for that matter, naturally had no interest in the sovereignty of Iraq
\nfor all those years–the globalists in the U.N. and in Europe place no value on it, as
\nwe saw in Kosovo. The integrity of Iraq only became a rallying cry when it was Mr.
\nBush who proposed to brutally violate it; Clinton violated it with the same impunity,
\nthough never to the same extent, but for properly globalist reasons. That does not
\nmake French opposition to the war wrong in itself, but it should also be kept in
\nmind, lest we imagine that they have started believing in the rights of nations once
\nmore.
\n Even Mr. Ritter, who has done so much good in undermining the technical claims
\nof the jingoes at considerable personal cost from smears directed against him, seems
\nto have worked on the assumption that if Iraq actually possessed such a weapons
\narsenal that war would be justified; his point was consistently that they didn’t have
\nvery much left, not that it would be wrong to invade even if they had them. The
\nassumptions that make such a conclusion possible certainly cannot possibly take into
\naccount the rights of a state of Iraq to seek to develop its own security policy, but it
\nfollows that if America has such a right to take independent action for national
\nsecurity then so has every other state. In response to the Suez campaign, both
\nPresident Eisenhower and Secretary Dulles–the latter not being especially famous
\nfor his respect of the integrity of foreign nations–insisted that if international law,
\nsuch as the U.N. Charter in which state sovereignty is protected, was to be binding,
\nthen it must be binding upon all. Mr. Bush and his band of madmen propose that
\nmost nations have no rights and that international law is binding only on those
\nnations.
\n Needless to say, most of the same people who have viscerally supported Mr.
\nBush in this war would never tolerate such foreign interference in the setting of our
\nown security policy–it is precisely because the U.N. seemed to be requiring that our
\nnational security be approved by other countries that this desire for noninterference
\nat “home” could be so effectively translated into mindless support for interference
\nabroad. Naturally, most Democrats, firmly believing that the U.N. is supreme, could
\nnever take a strong, universal defense of state sovereignty, because they respect
\nsuch sovereignty nowhere in the world, least of all here. This will always be their
\nphilosophical weakness, and it may be one of the few things that will work to save
\nMr. Bush’s political career.
\n Incidentally, a comparable violation of sovereignty, though never realised in its
\noriginal form, demanded by the globocrats was the Clinton demand made at
\nRambouillet in 1999 that Yugoslavia give NATO the run of its territory. For refusing
\nto be turned into a punching bag for foreign interventionists, Yugoslavia was duly
\npunished by a unified front of unprincipled globalists across Europe and the U.S.,
\nand indeed continues to be punished by the indefensible occupation of a
\nconsiderable section of its territory. In the end, though, measured compliance, such
\nas Iraq did give in fits and starts, brought it to a sorrier end than the initial defiance by
\nBelgrade. I suspect that this lesson may not be lost on the folks in North Korea.[\/i] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Interesting letter on the very legitimacy of weapons inspections, from Mr. Daniel Larison: Mr. O’Neill makes an excellent point. Though I must admit that I myself sometimes became caught up in what Blix said or didn’t say as some kind of evidence in the argument over the war itself, the regime of weapons inspections in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[676],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-antiwar-movement"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}