June 27, 2006
To restrain the actions of...guess who?
Charlene liked this bit, by David Bernstein, at Volokh Conspiracy:
The Cult of "International Law":
I've noticed in a variety of contexts that there are some rather well-educated, articulate individuals out there who have what seems to me to be a fanatical, quasi-religious belief in "international law", and the idea that it should trump any other conflicting consideration. In the constitutional law field, this is reflected in the argument that the president and the courts should ignore domestic law and the Constitution if they conflict with international law--even if the United States isn't a party to any binding international agreements on the particular subject at hand...
...The point of this post is not to defend the points I made in my email correspondence, but to ask informed readers about when and how "international law" gained such cult-like status that well-educated people believe that merely invoking it (or their interpretation of it) is sufficient to settle even the most nuanced and contentious debates, that it should always trump domestic law, etc. Please restrict your comments to either explaining, or, if you are so inclined, defending, this phenomenon. (Or is "international law" largely invoked to try to restrain the actions of the U.S. and Israel, but largely ignored more broadly?--e.g., I haven't heard of any other nation's besides Israel's legitimacy being questioned because of past or even present real or imagined violations of international law.) [Emphasis added. Thanks to Rand]
Bingo!
"International Law" is the biggest fraud since "dictatorship of the proletariat." There is no such thing. There can't be, because there is no international law-making body that possesses legitimacy. (There are international agreements, which are often quite useful. They are entered into voluntarily by nations.)
And the people who talk about "international law" are the same ones who are always gassing about "peace and justice." And it's always the same hokum: Lefties and terrorists up, America and Jews down.
Posted by John Weidner at June 27, 2006 08:27 PMWhen people invoke "international law," they don't mean international law. They mean what they think international law should be. Usually they make no effort to find out what international law actually says.
If you want to stop generals from doing what they want to do, the Geneva and similar conventions are not your friend. Think about who wrote them: a bunch of old white guys in frock coats and generals' uniforms. They spend some expense account money in the best hotel bars in Europe, wave a thick sheaf of papers at you, and say, "We were motivated solely by a desire to make war more humane." You find that plausible?
All that stuff about proper treatment of POWs? Encourages defeated enemy troops to surrender, instead of fighting to the death. No poison gas? Generals hate poison gas, the wind changes and you get bad headlines in the hometown paper. And so on.
