“By any standard of international law, the diplomatic course of the United States met all the obligations required by the truce with Saddam and by that same course acknowledged, finally, Saddam’s inability to live up to that truce and our ability, under international law, to no longer maintain the lull in hostilities that only the broken truce had previously provided.”
Sorry, This would have been accurate if we had the UN permission to break the truce. But we didn’t.
“Sorry, This would have been accurate if we had the UN permission to break the truce. But we didn’t.”
Sorry. In international law, the UN’s “permission” was not required or needed for the coalition that placed, and obtained, the truce and its demands on Saddam to identify, within their sovereign rights that the belligerent, Saddam, had broken the truce in such a manner that the defendants of the truce, the coalition, no longer had to continue it for him.
The UN is not a sovereign or a sovereign entity of any kind. It is not “the world’s top ‘government’, in any manner.
Sovereign nations may place a course of remediation in international disputes to be conducted through the auspices of an international forumn like the UN, and they may conduct diplomacy regarding how well those remediation measures are or are not being obtained by that agency, but that course does not move their sovereign rights in demanding the truce be lived-up to, irrevocably, to that agency.
When a truce has failed as the one on Saddam did, the parties that obtained the truce, that forced that truce on the belligerent, give up nothing of their sovereign right towards the legitimate course, in international law, in the inherent meaning of a truce and the sovereign rights of its principals - resumption of the lull in fighting if the truce is broken. Anyone who thinks the UN stands above those rights does not understand international law.