When someone remarked that leading academic figures tend to be cowards when it comes to their own regimes, there was much clucking of blogospheric tongues. "Oh no," said the children, "everyone knows that leading academics are critical of George W. Bush." Yes, it was replied, they are (after all, they're not dumb), but, of course, no one said they were all cheerleaders for their regimes; rather, their cowardice is manifest in "a fundamental unwillingness to pursue certain lines of critique, [in] pulling back from certain kinds of challenges to the status quo, [in] being keen to distinguish themselves from 'the lunatic left'....In particular, they tend to offer apologetics for 'inhumanity' and 'illegality': for example, the criminal and immoral invasion of Iraq."
What do leading academics sound like when they are not being cowards? Let us listen to this leading Canadian scholar:
This month marked the 60th anniversary of the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, the basic legal document for the trial of the major Nazi war criminals that commenced in November, 1945, wrote Osgoode Hall Law School Professor Michael Mandel in an opinion piece published in the Ottawa Citizen Aug. 26 and disseminated by US-based Knight Ridder news service.
"One of the great innovations of that charter was the charge of ‘Crimes Against Peace,’ defined as the ‘planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.’ The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive war illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defence the law ever gave, and to leave the warmakers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes."
"The crime of aggression is nowhere to be seen in modern international criminal codes and leading the charge against including it has been the United States itself. It's easy to see why," wrote the author of How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity. "The war in Iraq, for one example, constitutes the quintessential war of aggression, falling very far short, rhetoric apart, of any justification in self-defence or authorization by the Security Council of the United Nations, the only two accepted legal grounds for war in international law."
"Nuremberg prosecutor Bernard Meltzer wrote soon after the Nazi trials that, 'a modern war, no matter how chivalrous, involves so much misery that to punish deviations from the conventions without punishing the instigators of an aggressive war seems like a mocking exercise in gentlemanly futility.' Perhaps it is worth pondering, in the midst of the immense suffering unleashed by the Iraq war, whether we are engaged in the same mocking exercise when we prosecute those far down the chain of command for violations of the Geneva Conventions and let the unleashers of illegal wars get away with murder," concluded Mandel.
Now here is a question for the children: how many leading international law scholars in the United States have spoken so clearly on the subject? I am aware of only one: Richard Falk, now emeritus at Princeton. From the rest, we have had shameful rationalizations, obfuscations, or silence. Am I wrong?
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