Would a US/ NATO war in Syria be Legal in International Law?

[unhappycamper]

http://www.juancole.com/2014/09/syria-legal-international.html

Would a US/ NATO war in Syria be Legal in International Law?
By Juan Cole | Sep. 4, 2014

Efforts are being made in Congress give to President Barack Obama the formal authority to conduct air strikes in Syria against ISIL. Vice President Joe Biden is now talking, as well, about a concerted and long-term NATO response to the brutal fundamentalist movement, which controls desert territory and some oil resources in eastern Syria and northern and western Iraq.

The US air strikes in Iraq are probably not problematic in international law, though it is not clear that the government of out-going prime minister Nouri al-Maliki formally requested them. The Kurdistan Regional Government certainly did, but whether it has the authority, as a super-province of Iraq, to bring in a foreign power to conduct military operations is unclear in the Iraqi constitution. The Iraqi parliament would certainly have overwhelmingly voted to bring the US in if it had held a vote on the matter; I can’t find that it did. Still, the incoming prime minister Haydar al-Abadi certainly wants the intervention as would his cabinet, which will give ex post facto bilateral legality to the action.

There are limited grounds for military action in the United Nations Charter and associated treaty instruments to which the US is signatory. One is self-defense. Another is a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the international use of force to deal with a threat to world order. In the past decade and a half some thinkers have argued that prevention of genocide should trump other considerations and authorize even unilateral intervention (in US civil law it is permitted to use force to protect another person from clear and imminent physical danger on the part of a perpetrator, so this is an “altruistic” extension of the self-defense provision, in part with reference to the Rome Statute). The “responsibility to protect” argument, however, does not have firm legal grounding and is controversial.

The murky political situation in Iraq probably accounts for the odd diction of the Obama administration about their air strikes in defense of the Kurdistan capital of Erbil. They kept saying it was in part to protect US personnel in Erbil. This reference may have been a post-Benghazi way of talking about the US Consulate in Erbil, which is technically US soil and was menaced by ISIL. That is, the Obama administration was laying the ground for a “self-defense” doctrine of its Iraq military intervention until such time as the new Iraqi government is formed and can give more formal bilateral legal authorization to the operation. In any case, it is the Iraqi government that would have any grievance here, and it clearly does not and will not, so the US intervention in Iraq is, remarkably, uncontroversial except in Sunni fundamentalist circles there. Even the Shiite militia Asa’ib Ahl al-Haqq, which once kidnapped US troops from Karbala, is happy to fight beneath the cover of the US air strikes. And hard liners in Iran have been silent on the issue.

[ColesCountyDem]

1. Excellent article!

Thank you for posting it. I wish some posters in GD would read it.

[unhappycamper]

2. Feel free to cross-post this to GD.

[ColesCountyDem]

3. Thank you!