U.S., Iraq, & International Law by Jacques deLisle

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ILLEGAL?  YES.  LAWLESS?  NOT SO FAST:
THE UNITED STATES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, & THE WAR IN IRAQ
by Jacques deLisle

March 28, 2003

Jacques deLisle  is a  Senior Fellow  at the  Foreign Policy
Research Institute and directs our Asia Program.  He is also
a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania.


           ILLEGAL?  YES.  LAWLESS?  NOT SO FAST:
  THE UNITED STATES, INTERNATIONAL LAW, & THE WAR IN IRAQ

                     by Jacques deLisle

> From Beijing and Moscow, Paris and Berlin, Baghdad and other
capitals, from  the floor  of the  United  Nations  and  the
streets of  American cities,  and from the mouths of pundits
and experts,  we hear  the common  complaint:    the  United
States has acted illegally in attacking Iraq.  The charge is
correct, particularly  in the  formal, procedural  terms  in
which it  is most  often framed.   That  which is  not quite
lawful, however,  can be  almost legal  (or even  a means of
changing the law) and, thus, far from lawlessness.

True, the  United States  and its handful of active partners
in the  coalition did  not  obtain  the  Security  Council's
specific authorization  for their use of force against Iraq,
nor has the Bush administration articulated a credible claim
that this  a case  that falls  within one of the few, narrow
exceptions permitting  the  international  use  of  military
force without Security Council authorization.

But, contrary  to what  much  of  the  chorus  of  criticism
asserts or  assumes, unlawfulness  is not  the same thing as
lawlessness.     Eschewing  or  rejecting  prescribed  legal
processes is  not the  same thing  as  rejecting  all  legal
principle.     Not  adhering   to  the  international  legal
requirements set  forth in  the U.N.  Charter does  not lead
ineluctably to  the world  of Thucydides' Melian Dialogue in
which the strong do what they wish and the weak do what they
must.

Where some  legal rules  are breached,  principles can still
guide and constrain, justify and condemn.  And many of those
principles are  legal or  closely entangled  with law.    To
think otherwise  is to  hold a naive and crude notion of law
(particularly   international    law)    and,    thus,    to
underappreciate --  and to  put a risk -- the roles that law
can play  in the  war with  respect to  the war in Iraq and,
more importantly, the war's aftermath.

While a  more subtly  and politically  sober  conception  of
legality as  a matter of degree can make it possible for law
to play  such roles  does not  mean  that  it  will  happen.
Indeed, it  is least  likely to  occur under  what currently
seems  to   be  a  highly  plausible  scenario:    the  U.S.
administration  and  its  closest  allies  insist  that  the
evidence supports  their  claims  that  their  actions  were
nearly  legal   and  therefore   justified  or,   at  worst,
excusable, but traditional American allies, great powers and
much  of  the  rest  of  the  world  declare  themselves  --
disingenuously or not -- to be thoroughly unpersuaded.

ALMOST LEGAL (I) -- THE U.N. PROCESS
Official American  statements and  diplomatic efforts appear
to recognize  the  difference  between  "almost  legal"  and
"simply lawless,"  and the  potential  moral  and  political
significance  of   that  difference.   U.S.  arguments  have
included  or   implied  a   claim  that   the  circumstances
surrounding  the   Iraq  war   come  close   to   satisfying
international legal  conditions for permissible use of force
against a  sovereign state.   In  several specific arguments
that military  action  is  warranted,  the  U.S.  claims  of
"(almost) close  enough (to being legal)" have ranged across
the claim's  two principal  forms:  near-satisfaction  of  a
relatively   uncontroversial    requirement    for    lawful
international military  action, and possible satisfaction of
a more controversial or emergent legal ground.

The U.S. has pursued or asserted something that approaches -
-  but   does  not   reach  --  the  U.N.  Security  Council
authorization that would make war lawful under generally and
widely accepted  principles.  Unable to secure the requisite
nine votes  (with no opposition by any of the five permanent
members) on  the fifteen-member Council to authorize the use
of force  to enforce  earlier Security  Council resolutions'
requirement that  Iraq  disarm,  the  U.S.  and  sympathetic
commentators contemplated the next best things.

Thus, we  saw a  concerted effort  to round  up  nine  votes
(without unanimous acquiescence from the veto-holders) for a
resolution endorsing  military action.   If  the effort  had
been successful,  the U.S.'s  use of  force still  would not
have been  pursuant to  a legal  mandate from  the  Security
Council.   But the  lack of legality would have seemed to be
of a  narrower, more  technical sort.   It  would have  been
possible for  the U.S.  to say  that  its  actions  had  the
support of  the requisite supermajority of the Council  -- a
body designed to be broadly representative of the nations of
the world,  as well  as the  world's most  powerful nations.
The "only" legal defect then would have lain "merely" in the
fact that the minority in opposition included one or more of
the permanent  members, at least one of which (France) holds
a veto  on the basis of historical reasons more than current
strategic importance.

In the same general vein, the Bush administration reportedly
contemplated seeking  a  Security  Council  resolution  that
would have  declared Iraq  in violation  of the  obligations
prior resolutions  had imposed  on Iraq  to  cooperate  with
inspections  and   to  divest  itself  of  weapons  of  mass
destruction.   Such a  resolution,  again,  would  not  have
provided  the   specific  authorization  for  war  that  the
procedures in  the  U.N.  Charter  restrictively  prescribe.
But, here  too, the  falling short  of the legal requirement
might have  seemed significantly  less.  The U.S. could have
portrayed the  "legality gap"  as the  product  not  of  the
Security Council's  refusal  to  determine  that  legitimate
grounds for  the use  of force  existed but, rather, of some
Council members'  failure to  act responsibly in authorizing
the necessary  steps to  enforce the legal requirements that
they themselves  had crafted,  first in  Resolution 687 (the
1991 document requiring disarmament as part of the cessation
of hostilities  in the first Gulf War), and most recently in
Resolution 1441 (the 2002 action declaring Iraq in violation
of its  obligations under  687 and  other  resolutions,  and
warning   of    "serious   consequences"    for    continued
noncompliance).

Even in  the absence  of Security  Council action  declaring
Iraq  in   violation  of  Resolution  1441,  687  and  other
resolutions in  between, much  the same line of argument has
been available  to the U.S.  And the American administration
has not hesitated to avail itself of it:  By setting a legal
standard  for   Iraq's  disarmament  in  687  and  endorsing
"serious  consequences"  for  any  failure  to  comply,  the
Security Council  went a good part of the way to authorizing
force in  1441.   The U.S.  and its  supporters and partners
made much  the same  argument in  connection with the use of
force in the former Yugoslavia.

Moreover, advocates  of the  international legality or near-
legality of the U.S. use of force against post-Gulf War Iraq
have had yet another Security Council process-based argument
at their  disposal:   Resolutions 687,  1441 and  others are
clearly the  outgrowth of Resolution 678, which undisputedly
authorized military  action against  Iraq in  the first Gulf
War.     As  some  commentators  see  it,  this  provides  a
convincing case  for full-fledged  legality of  the  use  of
force  in   the  current   conflict  under  the  "unexpired"
authority in  678.   (Ironically,  this  argument  has  been
weakened as  a political matter by the U.S.'s seemingly law-
regarding impulse,  and  futile  effort,  to  seek  a  fresh
Security Council  authorization for  the use of force.)  For
many others,  such lineage-tracing  contains an  element  of
bootstrapping  that   cannot  satisfy   the  U.N.  Charter's
exacting standards.    But  the  analysis  still  grounds  a
powerful assertion  of near-lawfulness,  making the U.S. and
coalition  forces'   action  in   2003  the  clear  (if  not
necessarily legitimate) heir to a clear legal mandate to use
force.

ALMOST LEGAL (II) -- SELF-DEFENSE AND DEFENSE OF OTHERS
Other U.S.  arguments have  evoked (if not strictly invoked)
self-defense and the cooperative defense of other nations --
the  principal,  widely  accepted  exceptions  to  the  U.N.
Charter's prohibition  on the  use of force without specific
Security   Council    authorization.      Thus,   the   Bush
administration  has  stressed  the  prospect  that  Saddam's
regime would  pass weapons  of mass destruction to terrorist
groups, or  that Iraq  would attack  nearby nations  (a risk
made evident  by the invasion of Kuwait and the launching of
missiles at  Israel during  the first Gulf War), or that the
Iraqi regime  was excessively  entangled  with  al-Qaeda  or
similar groups.  To be sure, these dangers that American and
allied leaders  have claimed  Iraq poses  to the  U.S. or to
states in  the region  fall short  of the  occurrence or the
imminent threat  of armed  attack that  is the  conventional
requirement for internationally lawful use of force in self-
defense, and  that was clearly met with respect to Kuwait in
the first  Gulf War.  To the extent that the defense of more
immediately endangered Middle Eastern countries are at issue
in the  2003 conflict,  the unambiguous formal requests from
threatened  states   for  foreign   armed  assistance   that
international  law   ordinarily  demands   have   not   been
forthcoming.

Still, the  potential impact  and presumed  purpose of self-
defense-related  arguments   is  to  soften  or  reduce  the
perceived  "degree"   of  illegality   and,  more   broadly,
illegitimacy.   A peril  that is  not sufficiently  grave or
imminent to ground a winning legal argument still provides a
good deal  more to  a nation  contemplating military  action
than would  a situation  that posed  no meaningful threat or
present danger,  in which  case the  use of force would look
like little  more than  a Clausewitzian  continuation of the
amoral business  of politics by other means.  The permission
Kuwait, Qatar  and others granted to the coalition to deploy
forces from  their territory may not be the legally required
request for foreign assistance in self-defense, but it comes
pretty close,  especially in  light of the predictable Iraqi
reaction which  came swiftly  in the  form of  Scuds  lobbed
westward.

Moreover, the  American position  on the  question of  self-
defense has gone beyond such defensive postures to adumbrate
a more  assertive argument:  the hoary  international  legal
notion  of   self-defense  requires   updating  to   reflect
contemporary circumstances,  particularly post-September 11.
Where  the   threat  takes   the  form  of  another  state's
acquisition and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
or  its   support  for  international  terrorism  (including
through  providing   terrorists  with   such  weapons),  the
traditional international  legal notion  of  the  legitimate
trigger for  the "anticipatory" use of force in self-defense
-- a state's massing of troops along the border or a state's
clearly  signaling   its  intention   to  invade   --  looks
impossibly demanding.   If  effective self-defense  requires
"hot preemption"  or some  other  form  of  anticipatory  or
preventive action  beyond what  an unreformed legal doctrine
of self-defense  allows, then  the  failure  to  follow  the
outmoded legal  rules  is  likely  not  to  appear  patently
lawless or unquestionably condemnable, even to those who see
it as not lawful.

ALMOST LEGAL (III) -- INTERVENTION FOR BENIGN ENDS
Official U.S.  arguments for  using force  have incorporated
elements from  what is  increasingly known  in international
law  as   forcible  intervention   for  "benign   purposes,"
principally  intervention  for  democracy  and  humanitarian
intervention.     Thus,  the   American  administration  has
articulated a  goal of  "regime change"  that will produce a
democratic Iraq,  and it has pointed to gross and systematic
human rights abuses under Saddam's rule, including the Iraqi
ruler's "gassing  his own  people"  and  the  regime's  long
history of mistreatment of the Kurds and ruthless repression
of perceived political opposition.  Neither type of argument
is new  to the  repertoire of  law-tinged defenses  of  U.S.
foreign policy:   Intervention on behalf of democracy was an
oft-sounded theme  in connection  with U.S.  intervention in
Haiti, and  intervention on humanitarian grounds was part of
the  defense   of  intervention   in  Kosovo,   Somalia  and
elsewhere.

Here too,  U.S. arguments  that resonate  with international
legal notions  are less  than what international law demands
for the  lawful use  of force.   Intervention  for  "benign"
purposes  remains   a  contested   and  dubious   notion  in
international law, not least because of the problem of self-
judgment and  the risks  of opportunism  by interveners.  As
critics (whether  sincere or self-serving) have pointed out,
a doctrine  of democratic or humanitarian intervention risks
cloaking in  the trappings  of legality  and legitimacy  the
pursuit of  agendas that  are motivated by nothing more law-
regarding  or   laudable   than   Clausewitz's   dictum   or
Thucydides' Athenians.   Moreover,  the  situation  in  Iraq
before the  Second Gulf  War was not a paradigmatic case for
intervention  on   either  basis.    The  classic  case  for
intervention for  democracy  is  where  a  lawfully  elected
government has been ousted, recently, by the regime targeted
by the intervention.  And the relatively easy case (if there
is  one)  for  humanitarian  intervention  involves  rampant
ethnic cleansing,  genocide or  a complete collapse of order
that portends massive loss of life.

Yet, again, there is much to be said for -- and something to
be gained by -- being closer to legality rather than farther
from it.     Not all  invocations of  democratic values  and
human   rights    are    hypocritical    or    self-serving.
Interventions that credibly and convincingly seek to advance
democracy and  end the  type of  serious human rights abuses
that have occurred in Iraq can be characterized plausibly as
not patently lawless or thoroughly indefensible.

LAW AND THE BALANCE OF EVILS
Official U.S. arguments about the war in Iraq also have been
attuned to two other elements of international law governing
the  use   of  force:      principles   of   necessity   and
proportionality impose legal limits on the use of force even
where a legally adequate ground for using force exists.  The
U.S. and  its coalition  partners  have  been  at  pains  to
address the concerns underlying these doctrines.

In terms  of  "necessity,"  Bush  and  Blair  administration
officials  and  spokesmen  relentlessly  asserted  that  the
inspections process  was not working and, thus, that nothing
less than  military action would suffice to remove the grave
dangers that Saddam's regime posed to the world beyond Iraq.
In the  same vein, once Saddam rejected Bush's ultimatum for
going into  exile, it  became clear  that only  an  invasion
would achieve  the proclaimed  goals of  regime change  that
could lead  to disarmament,  democracy and  an end  to human
rights  abuses.     On   the  issue   of  "proportionality,"
explanations of coalition military strategy and methods have
stressed the  targeting only  of military  and  governmental
facilities and  command and  control systems, the sparing of
civilian lives  and infrastructure, and the use of improved,
precision-guided weapons  to achieve  the  coalition's  ends
with minimal collateral damage.

As the  combat has  turned uglier, another face of necessity
and proportionality-related  arguments has  emerged.    U.S.
reports of Iraqi violations or possibly impending violations
of international legal restraints -- in mistreating and even
executing POWs,  in using  civilians as  human  shields,  in
possibly shooting  coalition personnel  who were  trying  to
surrender, and  in perhaps preparing to use chemical weapons
-- grew  numerous, laying the grim groundwork for a possible
response to  charges  of  lawlessness  and  cries  of  moral
outrage that  would surely  proliferate amid the destruction
wrought  by  wayward  U.S.  or  British  munitions,  or  the
predictable adjustments  in coalition  tactics and  rules of
engagement triggered by Iraqi forces' guerrilla-style raids,
sham-surrender ambushes,  and use  of civilian  clothing and
vehicles.

Even the  most persuasive  argument and proof that coalition
acts adhered scrupulously to whatever rules of necessity and
proportionality might  be found  in international  law could
not make  military action internationally lawful where there
is no legally adequate grounds for using force at all.  But,
once again,  near-legality looks  a lot  better than  wanton
disregard for  law.  As official and unofficial defenders of
coalition actions have recognized, resorts to force that are
marginally  or   not-egregiously  unlawful  may  carry  less
opprobrium where they can be depicted as indispensable means
carefully tailored  to  minimize  collateral  harms  in  the
pursuit of almost-legal ends.

WHY A MISS ISN'T AS GOOD AS A MILE
To  those   whose  long-standing   or  new-found   love  for
international law  pervades their  criticism of the U.S.-led
war in  Iraq, the  suggestion that  the war's  international
legality is  somehow a  matter  of  degree  doubtless  seems
wrongheaded or  perverse or  suspiciously defensive  of  the
American agenda.   Law  (even international law), after all,
is supposed  to be  about stark  and polar -- if potentially
contested and  controversial --  choices.   The use, and the
particular uses,  of force  in  Iraq  are  either  legal  or
illegal.   Any discussion of a spectrum that runs from legal
and  legitimate   to  nearly   lawful  to   utterly  lawless
undermines that clarity and risks condoning the condemnable.
It muddies  the clear legal fact:  The U.S. and its partners
did not  obtain the  Security Council authorization that was
necessary to  make war lawful.  Shades of gray belong to the
realm of  politics or,  on  some  accounts,  morality.    To
embrace them  is to  concede law's  irrelevance or undermine
its potential contributions.

That view  is wrong  on all  counts.    It  ignores  obvious
features   of    international   law   and   their   obvious
implications.  The international legal system lacks singular
institutions with  the capacity to determine authoritatively
and effectively  whether an  act is  legal or  not.  Because
international law  does not have a viable executive, capable
of enforcing  the legal  rules, it  depends instead  on what
international law calls "horizontal enforcement" -- that is,
self-help (or other-helping) measures by those who in a more
robust legal  system would  depend on police and prosecutors
to redress  or deter encroachments on legal rights.  Because
international law lacks strong and authoritative judicial or
quasi-judicial institutions  (especially where  the  use  of
force is  concerned), interpretation  of legal  norms  is  a
decentralized  process  undertaken  by  interested  parties.
Such a  process is  understandably  prone  to  discord,  but
unevenly so.   Because  international law has no legislature
with the  ability to  craft clear  and binding rules, making
legal norms is an informal and pluralistic process.  States,
groups of  states and  other actors  often can  effect legal
change only  through acting  as law-entrepreneurs, sometimes
by  undertaking  and  defending  acts  that  are,  ex  ante,
illegal.   A legal  system that  depends on  such methods to
enforce, interpret  and make  law is  nearly  guaranteed  to
produce the  type of  heated disputes  over the line between
lawful undertaking  and illegal  overreaching that now swirl
around the U.S.-led actions in Iraq.

Embedded  in   many  denunciations  of  the  lawlessness  or
illegality of coalition action is the idea that the Security
Council can  play some or all of the roles of the core legal
and law-making  institutions of  a strong  and mature  legal
system --  and thus  that the  Security  Council's  approval
ought to  be regarded  as almost  always indispensable for a
lawful use of force.  That notion is either disingenuous, or
a  simplistic  projection  of  a  naive  model  of  domestic
legality in  states with a strong rule of law, or a mistaken
inference from  the atypical  and evanescent  moment of  the
early post-Cold  War and  the first Gulf War period when the
Council was not paralyzed by one or another veto-holders.

Given the  institutionally weak  and decentralized system of
international law  (which, in this respect, resembles a good
many domestic legal systems), to insist that the question of
an action's  legality can and must be answered with a simple
"yes"  or   "no"  is   to  do  what  those  who  now  invoke
international law  to criticize  the war  in Iraq purport to
abhor.   It is  to doom  international  law  to  inefficacy,
either by  asking it to issue definitive legal answers where
it cannot,  or by  limiting its reach to those few areas and
occasions   where   it   can   generate   seemingly   clear,
procedurally unimpeachable  judgments that  are likely to be
politically irrelevant  (and often  normatively questionable
in terms  of the  principles  underlying  substantive  legal
doctrines).

Contrary to  what such  critics might  fear, to  accept that
international legality  is in  part a matter of degree and a
spectrum of  gray does  not one-sidedly cut the U.S. and its
supporters a  great deal  of slack, much less a blank check.
While this  does open  the door  to the  claims of "(almost)
close enough  to legal" that the American administration and
its allies  have made,  it does not mean that such arguments
will succeed  or that international law has been deprived of
all bite.   Where  international law  is acknowledged  to be
less law-like  than some  might  assert,  imagine  or  hope,
international  legal  arguments  are  not  thereby  rendered
indistinguishable   from   the   extralegal   arguments   of
international   politics   or   consequentialist   morality.
Although not  unmovable or free of blurriness or dissension,
the  relevant   international  legal  principles  and  rules
provide  comparatively  fixed,  widely  (if  sometimes  only
formally or  hypocritically) accepted  and relatively  clear
benchmarks from  which "closeness"  and "remoteness"  can be
intelligibly measured.   With the opportunities that notions
of "degrees  of legality"  or "close  enough" afford  to the
coalition states  also come dangers of a distinctively legal
or law-related sort.

IN WHOSE COURT?:  FACTS, INTERNATIONAL OPINION AND LEGALITY
Whether the  U.S., its allies, supporters and defenders will
gain or  lose by  their resort  to arguments  in the vein of
"(almost) close  enough to legal" depends on what has yet to
happen or has yet to become known.
Much turns  on what  the degree of illegality will look like
in retrospect.  Will the U.S. and others be able to find the
votes in  the Security  Council for  resolutions  that  will
confer a  limited retroactive blessing on what the coalition
forces will  have wrought  in Iraq?   Failing that, will the
U.S. and  the U.K.  and like-minded  governments be  able to
beat back  (preferably through some mechanism other than the
veto) a  Security Council  resolution (or  perhaps a General
Assembly resolution,  where no  veto is  available) squarely
condemning the war as unlawful?

Will the  coalition forces  find physical  evidence or human
sources that  will clearly  and convincingly  establish that
Iraq possessed  large stockpiles  of chemical  or biological
agents or  other banned  weapons, had  plans to use them, or
made moves  to pass  them to terrorists?  Will states in the
region offer  sufficiently clear expressions of gratitude or
will  post-war   reports  of   extensive  quiet   or  secret
cooperation by  such states  in the  coalition's  operations
make the  situation appear  to  resemble  more  closely  the
collective defense paradigm of the first Gulf War?

Will  a   stable,  democratic,  human  rights-regarding  and
genuinely Iraqi  government succeed Saddam's regime?  Will a
more open post-war Iraq generate a torrent of fresh, graphic
and persuasive  evidence of  human rights  atrocities  under
Saddam's rule?

Will  coalition  forces  manage  to  inflict  few  harms  on
civilians and  to provide  the assistance necessary to avert
humanitarian crises  in Iraqi  cities?   Will  Iraqi  forces
resort to  chemical or  biological weapons or widespread and
severe violations  of the  laws of  war?   Will  reports  of
Saddam's loyalists'  severe abuses  and  killings  of  Iraqi
citizens and prisoners of war bear out?

Affirmative answers  to these  questions of fact, of course,
would  greatly   strengthen  the   U.S.  and  its  partners'
arguments for the near-legality and, thus, the legitimacy of
their war  in Iraq.   But  in international  law's world  of
decentralized authority  and weak  institutions,  facts  are
funny things.   What legally relevant facts do (and, in such
cases as possible Security Council resolutions, what legally
relevant  facts   are)   depends   on   persuading   foreign
governments and  the  constituencies  that  influence  them.
This maxim  is especially  strong where -- as is clearly the
case in Iraq -- there will be international disputes aplenty
(both  honest   and   duplicitous,   both   reasonable   and
preposterous) about  what "really"  happened before,  during
and perhaps after the war.

Here, the  U.S. and  its  partners  and  proponents  face  a
difficult task.  Whether one characterizes it as fighting an
uphill battle on unreasonably steep terrain, or climbing out
of a  deep hole  of the  U.S.'s  own  making,  the  task  of
persuading much  of the  world that  coalition actions  were
indeed "(almost)  close enough  to legal"  will be  no  mean
feat.   One can  attribute more  or less of the blame to, on
one  hand,   American  diplomatic  bungling,  bullying,  and
insensitivity or  the Bush  administration's prior  contempt
for international  law, or,  on the  other hand, the cynical
calculations of narrow self-interest, the desperate grasping
for the influence due a great power, or the awkward attempts
to  cover  up  complicity  with  Saddam's  regime  variously
undertaken by  France or  Russia or  Germany or China.  But,
whatever  its   mix  of   origins,  the  challenge  will  be
formidable.

If the coalition partners can produce very good facts and if
the Bush  administration and  its supporters  can do  a much
better job  of presenting  them to  the post-Iraq  war world
than they  did in arguing the pre-war case for intervention,
then the  U.S. and  its coalition  allies might  -- but only
might --  secure the  politically useful outcome that is the
closest that  international law  can  come  to  a  favorable
judgment under  the  circumstances:    much  of  the  world,
including the  great powers  and  traditional  U.S.  allies,
might accept that the war in Iraq was almost legal, far from
lawless and  thus a relatively minor breach and perhaps even
a step  toward developing an international legal regime that
accepts a post-September 11 reconception of self-defense and
an expanded  notion of  forcible intervention for benevolent
purposes.

Such an  outcome, however,  is far  from certain, and at the
moment may  seem very  unlikely.   The failure to achieve it
would represent  not  just  a  diplomatic  setback  for  the
American and British administrations and states that have to
varying degrees sided with them.  It would also be a blow to
the  role  of  international  law  and  international  legal
institutions   in    legitimating   and   constraining   the
international use  of force.   This is precisely the outcome
that the  states denouncing American lawlessness accused the
Bush  administration  of  courting,  but  it  is  one  that,
ironically, will  also have been in part the product of such
states' political  tactics having  leaned so  heavily  on  a
narrow,  rigid   and  ultimately   brittle   conception   of
international legality.


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