Quote:
Originally Posted by Gozer
Violation of international law isn't that complicated.
There is a law, there is a plain violation of the law.
Your defence seems to be 'the jury won't convict' which is probably true, but that's not as abstract as you make it out to be. The US won't present evidence of their assurances of Assad's guilt before the public, the UN observers, nor the security council. Is international law defined by the most powerful army? The most populous faction? As you say, the charter itself is meaningless.
This is the ugliest implication of Bush's 'coalition of the willing' and Obama's 'consensus building'; the law is what we say it is, and anyone not supporting that argument is our enemy. Putin makes a very lucid argument of this attack on Syria, but Putin's argument doesn't matter because he's not part of the clique. He's a bad guy, so his argument is dismissed; what kind of legal principle is that?
It's a very nebulous approach to moral & legal questions. Generally, Trump/Bernie supporters were furious with the attacks, and Clinon/Bush supporters approved them (referring more to the chattering class than populace here). This is the neoliberal foreign policy that the country voted against when they supported Ron Paul, Bernie, and Trump. I don't have enough knowledge to reach farther back with populist candidates, but I'm sure it could be done. This manner of war propaganda is from the same playbook as the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Your last line shows you've fallen into this morasse. Why are the two sides of this argument 'pro-Trump and anti-Trump'? Why is that dichotomy relevant in the context of the integrity of international law? And the line that precedes it, about both sides being equal, is the kind of lazy hand-washing that ######s any kind of introspection. Is emotionally manipulating the public into acquiescence of a war equal, morally, equal to emotional manipulation of not condoning a war of aggression in violation of the UN charter?
What is the emotional manipulation that my side is engaging in? My signature?
My criticism of Trump's actions are explained by my dislike of Trump? Because the alternative is that I'm concerned about Assad's airforce? Where, in that framing, do integrity and respect for law reside?
This is a very Clintonian framing; triangulate the variables, define the factions, and bully the refs until your position as the only conceivable consensus.
This is what an international police state looks like to any citizen of a country that doesn't have a seat at the table. As a Canadian, I'm protected from capricious use of deadly force because we have a seat at the table, nothing more.
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I'm not going to reiterate the points on international law. I will say that international law is largely "consent based governance". So it relies on Assad to consent to have international law govern his conflict....he's not doing that, as he's a monster responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
Trump most certainly did state he planned to take actions like this in his campaign though. He criticized the Democrats heavily for over-projecting their actions, and stated explicitly that he would make "sneak attacks" against dictators and Islamists.
I also hate to break it to you, but there's already a war in Syria that will continue regardless of the recent US attack. Trump is clearly not escalating this into a full out war on Assad, as that would put him in direct conflict with Putin, who Trump probably consulted on this move.
Putin is a bad guy because he invaded the Ukraine and annexed a large portion of its territory. As for your argument that an attack cannot happen without proper procedure, we both know that's not possible. It take the international courts the better part of a decade to come to conclusions. That's if Russia would allow any kind of proper investigation. Even then, they'd veto any kind of action.
So the choice for Trump was make a token attack against Syria or do nothing. I also hope you will see how your obsession with all of this is playing right into Trump's hands. He made a relatively small attack, most likely with permission from Putin. By building this up into something it's not, the only thing your accomplishing is adding to Trump's typical BS grandstanding. Essentially the same mistakes the Hillary campaign made, which got Trump elected in the first place, despite being dangerously underqualified.