If you are going to pick a day to support the brave people of a Government uprising, it is probably best not to choose the day when it is announced that those uprisers are the same ones that you have been fighting a war against in the country next door for the past decade.
James Clapper, the Director of US National Intelligence, has told Congress that the people Syrian President, Bashar Al-Assad, is fighting against are Al-Queada terrorists.
His comments confirmed earlier reports that US officials suspect Al-Queada is behind the Syrian carnage, confirmed by Bin Ladens replacement, Ayman al-Zawahri, who has been posting videos calling on his members to bring their own particular brand of murder and mayhem to Syria.
Not sure how the trio of Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama will spin the news that they are directly supporting Al-Queada but we can be sure that they won't change their aim of regime change in Syria.
Just today, the French and British leaders spoke of the need to find new ways of getting rid of Assad.
Cameron said: 'We have to put all the pressure we can on Bashar al-Assad to make him stand down' which sounds dangerously like regime change to me, and isn't that illegal under International law?
One of the arguments against the military intervention in Iraq focused on the absence of United Nations Security Council authorisation for military action. Tony Blair knew that invasion would be illegal and avoided any mention of regime change when laying the shaky ground for the invasion as did Clinton in Kosovo, both using human rights and humanitarian claims as part of the legitimising factors for intervention.
The NATO invasion of Afghanistan was all about removing the Taliban from power, while the Libyan conflict was always about bringing down the Government headed by Gaddafi even if it was achieved through the sleight of hand that was the UN resolution for a no-fly zone.
Now with Syria, they are not even pretending it is about anything other than regime change and how best to bring it about so what happened to those international laws that states that forcibly removing a head of state is illegal?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, states that 'the only legitimate government is one based on the will of the people', which it is safe to assume means the people in that country, not other people from other countries deciding who can and can't be in Government.
Secondly, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognises self-determination as a human right and specifies that 'by virtue of that right all peoples have the right to freely determine their political status'. Again, safe to assume that means another country should not be choosing another countries leaders for them.
Then there is the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force 'against the political independence of another state'.
So violations of these must constitute an international crime but it seems that nobody is going to pull up the Obama's, Sarkozy's and Cameron's who have taken a step on from the Bush, Blair and Aznar era and actually proudly shout their international law violations from the rooftops.
7 comments:
lucy,
long ago we went from thousands of isolated tribes scattered widely to a few nations closely packed. In other words imagine each nation being a person and the world having approx 200 people. The 200 are now fighting over limited resources. The 200 have different ideals.
All the weak ones get together in the UN and make up shit that sounds good (too people of the far left) in an attempt to shift the power to themselves and to shift the wealth to themselves. They are power hungry and greedy little bastards (like david g) they just don’t have the power and the wealth… give it time and the power and wealth will shift around. It always does.
q
oh god, why would we believe those who have lied to us before...no reason i can think of.....
Not sure what your point is q. I am saying the idea of regime change is illegal. It spooked Tony Blair and is why so many people are wanting to drag him off to the Hague but here is the next Prime Minister quite boldly saying he wants to remove the Syrian President. What's the difference except one did it and denied it but another is quite open about doing it? Why is nobody tapping Obama, Sarkozy & Cameron on the shoulder and whispering they are breaking international law.
my point, those 3 documents you highlighted are rhetoric.
q
The thing that pisses people off is the deceit. If you don't intend to abide by a particular international agreement, then don't sign it. But what's happened, in the examples that you cite (and in other cases, like anti-torture conventions), is that these agreements are signed, and then flagrantly disregarded... and then people like Bliar hire the best spin-doctors & lawyers that our money can buy to explain back to us that they are, in fact, still acting in accordance with international law, when they clearly are not. Nobody really believes them of course, but the interests of the status quo get perpetuated in this way, and it's not like our leaders need to be popular in places in like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria anyway, so they get away with it. In theory people can be prosecuted in The Hague for breaches of international law but this doesn't happen much: The 'winners' know too much, and the 'losers', well, it looks like we're big fans of summary executions these days, rather than of procedural law.
Yep they're not even pretending anymore. After seeing how easy it was to pull Iraq 2 off, I guess they figured creating some decent propaganda and a shaky pretext for war would be a waste of time and money.
Oh and let's not forget how easy it was to pull off Libya. I dont think the majority of western taxpayers were even aware that it happened.
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