Or not. A legal basis for the invasion of Iraq seems to be in a similar category to all those Iraqi WMDs. Very hard to find.
The Web site of the Carlisle Barracks of the US Army War College has some great stuff. Someone could easily do a daily blog just pulling portions of some the reports they have there and commenting on them. One that recently caught my attention is Bounding the Global War on Terrorism (Dec. 2003) by Jeffrey Record of the US Air Force's Air War College.
Record has a lot of informative and challenging things to say in that paper. And this little bit - consigned to endnote 51 - is one of them. I've mentioned before that the difference between "preemptive" war and "preventive" war has to do with more than brand labeling. It's also an important legal distinction:
According to the Defense Department’s official definition of the term, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was a preventive war, which traditionally has been indistinguishable from aggression, not a preemptive attack, which in contrast to preventive war has international legal sanction under strict conditions. Preemption is "an attack initiated on the basis of incontrovertible evidence that an enemy attack is imminent." Preventive war is "a war initiated in the belief that military conflict, while not imminent, is inevitable, and that to delay would involve greater risk." See Joint Publication 1-02,
DOD Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 12, 2002, pp. 333, 336.A truly preemptive war is legal under the international laws to which the US has bound itself by treaty commitments. A preventive war is a criminal act of aggression in international law.
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[If I were posting this after the 2500-character limit is increased, I would have added:] That's why I've been surprised that Bush officials and apologists have made such a big deal about how they supposedly never said the threat from Iraq was "imminent." If Administration decision-makers did not believe the threat from Iraq was "imminent," then they were undertaking a war that they knew to be illegal under American and international law. - Bruce
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