Iraq Invasion Illegal 

Iraq Invasion Illegal

In an interview with the BBC on Wednesday, Kofi Annan flat out said what he has been dancing around for a year and a half, that the US led invasion of Iraq was illegal. The reaction of the US and its allies in the war to these comments was predictably to deny that was the case. Yet cleary Annan was speaking the truth. What's interesting is why the US would deny it or why the Bush Administration would care.

Bush's most direct response to Annan's remarks was to mention while campaigning in Minnesota that the UN Security Resolution in November warned of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to disarm or account for missing weapons materials. The United States after that, though, repeatedly tried unsuccessfully to force through the Security Council resolutions authorizing military action by the US to enforce the resolution. Implicit in this attempt is an acknowledgement that UN authorization for military action was necessary for such action to be legal. Lacking the authorization, the subsequent military action was, by UN standards, illegal.

What I'm really curious about is why the Bush Administration cares. A year and a half ago, on the brink of and immediately following the invasion, Bush and his people couldn't find enough ways to thumb their noses at the UN, going so far as to imply on numerous occasions that the UN, by failing to authorize the use of force was flirting with irrelevancy. Events since that time have revealed to all but the Republican faithful that our headlong rush into war was, shall we say imprudent, and now we need all the help we can get, not just in Iraq, but in North Korea, Iran, and Africa to try to maintain some kind of order. The unilateralism that marked the first eight months of the Bush administration and came roaring back in the fall and winter of 2002-03 has left us overstretched and unable to respond meaningfully to events in the world. The relevance of and need for a strong UN should now be clear. In the absence of the UN, or a comparable organization or network of alliances, it would fall to us, the only superpower, to be the only keeper of order in the world. Bush has demonstrated spectacularly that he and his crew lack the competence to do the job.