Three's A Crowd

A crowd of fabulous new posts, that is! I knew there were other bloggers on this site. Glad to see us back to full strength...

In any case, in my colleagues' collective break I may have focused a bit too much on "Independence Day" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" so this sudden burst of actual analysis is welcome. But, in truth, it seems I'm a bit rusty with scholarly thought as I didn't fully understand Harold's post on the rules-based international system. I won't blather through my ignorance, but I don't exactly follow the argument. I get that a system eliminating any and all interstate war is a utopian menace -- that the act, implication and threat of war does provide benefit to our modern global community. Our focus, I agree, should be to eliminate evils like genocide and famine. But what Bush and Blair are being accused of is faking evidence to start a war -- and what's worse, using United Nations aircraft as a way to "trick" Iraq into starting a global conflict. I agree that wars can be OK -- the history of the world surely demonstrates this -- but they are being accused of more than just bending the "rules of sovereignty and non-intervention," as far as I can tell. They are being accused of breaking international law by betraying the world's trust in the UN. I guess my confusion comes from the fact that I agree we should focus our international energies on doing away with real evils, and not war as a concept. I just don't quite see how that connects to this specific narrative.