I have mixed reactions when I stories of dictators and military leaders being tried and hanged for crimes against humanity. While I cheer every time a politician is thrown behind bars, I’m also cynical enough to realize that it is Nuremburg-style justice, where the better armed governments dispose of the lesser, without any accountability for their own crimes.
Which brings me to Israel. An Israeli group, in a remarkable act of chutzpa, pressed charges against some of their own generals in a British court for war crimes. The generals, then, decided not to visit Britain after that.
In tones reminiscent of a schoolyard bully warning his victims not to tattle, “Israeli lawmakers have countered these events with a bill proposal to ban Israeli citizens from filing lawsuits and criminal complaints in foreign countries against members of the security forces.” source
What is your opinion? Do you think British, or American, or UN courts should try leaders of foreign countries for crimes that took place on foreign soil? Or do you think that uppity democratic nations should mind their own business to avoid blowback?
Do you suspect that wars are too politicized, and that everybody is too biased one way or another to render justice when it is needed?
I don’t think a free society is compatible with the idea of punishment in the sense of hanging people for their crimes.
But that being said, I think US did a good deed ridding the Irakians of Saddam Hussein. However, their actions are immoral in the fact that they established a democratic government there. Ridding a slave of his master does not excuse continuing slavery under a different regime.
International law only concerns relations between sovereign nations. Individuals are subject to the criminal laws of the nations which have jurisdiction over them, consistent with the notions of due process.
The idea of a criminal law with global reach over individuals makes no jurisprudential sense. If nations are not sovereign, then we’re ruled by a tiny clique of stupid, evil bureaucrats from the US, Scandinavia and Western Europe. Eff that.
From a consequentialist perspective, hanging Saddam was a wrong thing.
That’s because Saddam was a secular leader, and hence the greatest enemy of Islam in the Middle East. It was through him that violent forces demanding Islamic theocracy were killed en masse, and the beneficiary of this little deal is only to the rest of the world, because those people did not get the chance to spread their Islamic theocracy elsewhere. Consider that those Islamic theocrats recognize no borders and no order, even natural order, other than of their own book, and are now the other dangerous group that American soldiers are left to keep fighting.
I don’t condone Saddam’s gassing of people, but one violent interventionist authority disposing of another violent interventionist authority, of whom the latter was of relatively more benefit alive, in its own right is a good argument against the matter of interventionism by the former.
What the leader of a sovereign country does in his own country is his own business - the rest of the world is no position to say otherwise.
But being that many more people live in America than in Iraq, it would have been an even better deed had Saddam Hussein got ridd of democracy in the US.
Perhaps my formulation was misfortunate. Overthrowing that regime was a good thing taken separately. Killing 100k Irakians wasn’t. I certainly agree it’s not excusable.
Possibly. I wasn’t talking about intentions though: neither Bush nor Saddam would have any intentions of truly liberating each other’s peoples, no… Which is why we can put both of them roughly in the same category.
You guys just don’t get it, do you? If anyone (including the US government) did a surgical strike on the Saddam government, without killing innocents and establishing another government there, that would be a fine thing. My first post expressly takes into account that not only the government was overthrown, and I gave an example. I’m not supporting what the US actually did.
So it’s okay if I steal your money, buy a gun with the stolen money, and then kill a criminal with gun? Btw, what if the victims of the criminal wanted restitution?
But the point there would be (presuming Eduard’s view is correct) only that the USG also did things that it should not have, not that deposing Saddam Hussein was unjustified.
In any case, I lean toward classical international law. The problem is that the only real, sovereign country on this planet is the United States Federal Government (and the intellectual-mediastapo that control it); all other ‘countries’ are illusory. The so-called ‘third world’ is simply the worst governed of the American provinces, which has something to do with the State department’s predictably sadistic temprament.
The only real hope I see for the political situation (which does not involve the catastrophic collapse of our Beloved Empire and the resulting reign of barbarian looters) is for democracy to be rejected, en toto.
Have I ever said that justifies extortion (erm, taxes)? No. Have I ever said it’s a good thing to do good things by doing bad things? No. But a good thing is still a good thing no matter who does it.