Here we go again. Perfectly consistent with its pattern of violating the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles -- a pattern I have discussed at length in settings such as Latin America, Vietnam, Iraq, and Iran -- the federal government is now beating the war drums to intervene in Syria's civil war.
Let's review. Under the international legal order that the United States was instrumental in establishing after the Second World War, military force may be used only 1) in self-defense; 2) in defense of others; or 3) when authorized by the UN Security Council. There is no warrant under international law for using force against a nation merely because of its internal strife. That was the same excuse the Japanese used to invade China; that Italy used to invade Ethiopia; and that Germany used to invade places such as Czechoslovakia and Poland. None other than Justice Robert Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court -- when he sat on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg -- condemned all excuses for initiating war against a nation that had not attacked another nation.
Our own civic deity, Abraham Lincoln, told Europe to keep its mittens out of our affairs during the War Between The States. That war claimed more than 650,000 lives and saw plenty of innocent (Southern) civilians slaughtered, so it's rather odd to hear the same federal government that perpetrated and profited from the slaughter complain about a much smaller variant of it elsewhere, let alone as an excuse to intervene and stop it.
I'm glad Russia is refusing to play along; there will now be no veneer of legitimacy provided by the Security Council. I would submit that such an approval would be ultra vires anyway because the Council's authority does not extend to purely domestic matters, but the absence of approval is certainly good enough for me.
Do I cheer what the Syrian government is doing? Of course not, but that's not the issue. We live in an imperfect world in which we must pick our poison. The poison of national sovereignty can be bitter, but it is sweet as ambrosia when compared to the alternative of hegemonic globalism. I've said it before, and I will say it again -- competition among rival sovereignties is the ONLY proven restraint against government power. The elites hate national sovereignty because they are political monopolists who hate competition. If they succeed in destroying national sovereignty, there will be nowhere left to run.
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