Can you smell impeachment?

swears

preppy-kei
Yeah, but America is different, its foreign policy affects the whole world. Particularly Britain, people from the UK deployed in the middle east could live or die based on the outcomes of US policy. The whole world watches the US elections, you couldn't say that of Sweden.
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
The war notwithstanding, it does seem like the administration has been involved in a lot of shady dealings over the last couple of years, so I’m sure there are impeachment counts galore.
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
Yeah, but America is different, its foreign policy affects the whole world. Particularly Britain, people from the UK deployed in the middle east could live or die based on the outcomes of US policy. The whole world watches the US elections, you couldn't say that of Sweden.

What! You didn’t follow it last autumn? ;)
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
The right-wing bloc ousted a de facto coalition of the social democrats, the green party and the communist party. David Cameron was here seeking advice a couple of weeks ago.
 
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vimothy

yurp
The "legality" question will never be sufficiently resolved. I remember Tony Benn's response to the No Fly Zones that protected the Kurdish statelet and the Shi'ite South for a decade: "but...they're...illegal!" (He could equate No Fly Zones with ruinous economic and cultural sanctions, which was a skill of some sort. The latter, of course, killed a lot of people; the former, though never being authroised by the UN, saved a lot of people. Bit of an odd position for Benn to take.) I think you'll read something as clear and precise and academically rigorous as Detter and still be having the same arguments.

Oh quite - I have noticed that the legality of war issue regarding Iraq is heavily politicised, yet never really discussed beyond its use as a partisan bat to beat the government. "The war was illegal, put Blair on trial!" No one ever explains any of the details. I guess I was trying to allude to that as well as just asking for links.

As for Tony Benn, he's nowt but another upper-class twit: ten a penny in this country.
 
What I really want to know though is the detail - how has international law been broken, where, what are the consequences, what are the precedents, etc - anyone know any good links to any laywers working in the field writing blogs, for instance? Anyone here got a background in international law or just law generally?

Just to give one example out of hundreds: The nonprofit American Society of International Law, consisting mainly of scholars, has laid out the case against President George W. Bush as a war criminal in article after article in a dispassionate fashion.

But very briefly:

Any law scholar will tell you that pre-emptive self-defense is unlawful under international law – from Article VI of the Nuremberg Charter to the UN Charter. In fact, the United States was the guiding force behind both the Nuremberg trials and the establishment of the United Nations. At the end of the second world war, with the Nazis defeated and discredited, the United Nations Charter, a treaty binding on the U.S., prohibited nations using preventive force in Article II, Section 4. Only the Security Council has the authority to take measures against “threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.”

The only exception to this is the right of individual and collective self-defense that the U.S. and Britain invoked under Article 51. The key, of course, is that you have to be attacked or that an enemy must be in the process of attacking you. Under the UN Charter, you cannot simply say here’s a list of “rogue nations” who may at some undefined time in the near future pose a threat to you because they may harbor weapons of mass destruction, which we have in abundance, and they are not allowed to have. Nor is there anything under international law that says simply developing a weapons program amounts to an armed threat or attack. If this were true, every country on Earth would be justified in attacking the U.S., the country with the greatest number of WMD’s, at any time.​

But that's only the beginning ...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Does this mean that, under current law, it would have been illegal for the UK to declare war on Germany in 1939?

I'm not trying to be deliberately provocative, I'm just curious.
 

shudder

Well-known member
That was quite different. On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. France and the UK gave Germany two days to withdraw their troops. They did not withdraw, and so France and the UK declared war on Germany. This a response, very specifically, to Germany's infringing on Poland's sovereignty, and I suppose is roughly analogous to America's causus belli (sorry, couldn't help using that!) in the first gulf war, and nothing like whatever rationales were used for this one.

I'm no expert on whether the WWII declarations of war would have been legal under the UN charter, but I strongly suspect they would have been.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
The war notwithstanding, it does seem like the administration has been involved in a lot of shady dealings over the last couple of years, so I’m sure there are impeachment counts galore.

Show me a president who couldn't have been impeached. They're all corrupt.
 
N

nomadologist

Guest
*chuckle@self*

impeaching Bush would just force us into a slightly worse mess for a year. we should just let them live out their legacy of terribleness, and then let the dems get the credit for fixing the mess when they get elected next fall. no need to waste more tax dollars on a token "impeachment" trial. it's, in fact, the worst mistake the democratic party could make right now: it would be seen as pointlessly divisive in a time when unity is needed more than every...
 

borderpolice

Well-known member
That was quite different. On Sept. 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. France and the UK gave Germany two days to withdraw their troops. They did not withdraw, and so France and the UK declared war on Germany.

Of course, as imperial powers, France and the UK had invaded a rather large number of other countries themselves (especially those with natural resources) and with no intention of leaving. I guess it's a case of: "Do as we say not as we do!" Not to mention the fact that soviet union had just killed probably over 20 million citizens and had been arming for invasion of western europe on a massive scale since 1929.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
may not be entirely good idea in terms of repercussions, but i would fucking LOVE to see it happen.

bodycountimpeach011ma1.jpg


BodyCount_IMPEACH_001.jpg


http://beachimpeach.com/
 
Does this mean that, under current law, it would have been illegal for the UK to declare war on Germany in 1939?

I'm not trying to be deliberately provocative, I'm just curious.

No, it means nothing of the sort. Why don't you peruse the international conventions and rulings, most of which were formulated as a direct response to the circumstances and the outcome of that war, as Shudder alludes, instead of being deliberately provocative.
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