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I: Introduction
In the recent run-up to the second Gulf War, many people found themselves
drawn to the following position: the war against Iraq is justified only if conducted under
the auspices of the appropriate international institution (in this case, the United Nations
Security Council). To those adamantly in favor of the war, this position seemed not
merely wrong, but downright bizarre, resting on what they saw as utterly irrelevant
considerations. Their argument was that, given the particular questions on which their
case for war hinged – i.e. whether or not regime change in Iraq was necessary in order to
make the world safer – U.N. endorsement could not possibly make any difference one
way or the other. If the considerations in favor of the war were as pressing as they
maintained, then the failure to secure U.N. endorsement wouldn’t make them any less so.
And, if their case for war turned out to rest on erroneous assumptions, then nothing the
U.N. did or said could change that either. They contended that to insist nonetheless that
the justifiability of the war turned on the U.N. was, then, essentially to make a fetish out
of the ideal of internationalism. One pro-war journalist summed up this attitude thusly:
“[T]he United Nations doesn't have any inherent moral prestige simply because it's an
international body.”
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As directed toward the matter of whether or not to go to war in the first place, this
particular debate is long settled, and settled very much in favor of those who did not see
any need for international endorsement. Nonetheless, the fundamental question around
which that debate revolved merits continued attention. Is there a basis for holding that
settled international institutions are inherently more legitimate than individual states, or
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Jonathan Chait, http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2002/12/transcript-debate-12-11.html.
Convention