INTRODUCTION
The US invasion of Iraq is among the most glaring of norm violations, by legal
and international opinion accounts. Lacking UN approval or any defensible self-defense
claim, its counternormative nature was evident by the global condemnation of statesmen
and the general publics alike. It occurred without UN authorization and was not viably a
claim of self-defense, the two recognized reasons for using force under international law
and norms. A third, though controversial, legitimate use of force is humanitarian to save
lives from current or pending widespread massacre. The US action does not fit the
common conception of humanitarian intervention, which calls on necessity and
immediacy to address current or coming crimes against humanity, rather than acts long
past (“gassing his own people” in the 1980s) or mere repressiveness of the regime (Roth,
2004). Normatively speaking, the US violated international norms related to the use of
force (Kegley and Raymond, 2003). If one believes norms are not “objectively known”
but intersubjectively produced (Cronin, 1993, 2001; Krasner, 1999), the US still fares
poorly in normative judgment: world opinion—mass and elite—indicated opposition to
the act as “illegal” and contravening the UN and international law. Others argue this was
an enforcement action of previous resolutions violated by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but
this is not widely shared and validated intersubjectively by world opinion.
This case is consequential on many face-value points, but also represents more
fundamental questions. The US prided itself through history as a country that doesn’t
“start” wars out of the blue; even tenuously justified actions such as Panama and Grenada
had a modicum of plausibility in that Americans were under duress or violence to various
degrees (a self-defense argument violating proportionality in most people’s eyes, but
Convention