What a contradiction here:

" The invasion of Iraq did violate the U.N. Charter, but it removed one of the world's worst international lawbreakers. " So it was good to INTERVENE.

" A genocide took place in Sudan, but an intervention without Security Council authorization .... would have been unlawful..", so the US, "... had no obligation to intervene in Sudan". and did well to NOT INTERVENE.

Selective law is also law, after all. Now, what exactly are you proposing in this shoddy article? Abolish the internatiol law and go back to the Middle Ages?

"Think Again: International Law" is another steaming load of crap from those who want to rewrite history to help the Bush / Cheney criminal conspiracy escape justice.

FREE AMERICA

REVOLUTIONARY (DIRECT) DEMOCRACY

To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's attitude on foreign relations
"Friendship and commerce with all; entangling alliances with none".

We are by no means bound by international law, nor should we be. The whole concept of international law has our founders rolling over in thier graves.

International law would be a good idea, if it's vlaidity was derived from the US Constitution. However, our global communitay has such a diversity of cultures that concepts of free speech, religious diversity and free markets aren't always recognized.

Following up on Posner’s mention of the Law of the Sea treaty, he raises a valid point in saying the Obama Administration needs to do more. As the only nation that is truly globally deployed, the U.S. has a unique stake in the stability and reliability of international law, and the U.S. cannot continue to rely on customary international law, whose application can be unpredictable, to guarantee our rights at sea. Joining the treaty would, in the words of the just released Ocean Policy Task Force, “strengthen the country’s ability to participate in and influence international law and policy related to the ocean.” This is why the Joint Chiefs and the U.S. Coast Guard have urged the Senate to ratify the treaty. But the Senate needs a clear signal from the White House that it is committed to moving the treaty.

While I highly commend this article for its informative and insightful contrasts (not something we see very often in news journals, especially with international issues) and take exception with the interpretation of some commenters that the author was taking partisan sides in the argument, I do feel that several important points were missing from the discussion and found some conclusions to be incomplete and a few others mistaken or misleading.

1) While human rights treaties are not completely useless as is (they have at least given hope and moral credence to the idea of the rights of all people, have at least driven under cover assertions to the right of subjugation, and in international non-binding judgments of human rights violations, countries scurry to avoid being labeled as violators, despite the lack though not complete absence of international enforcement at this point in world history), they have indeed not been successful in stopping many egregious abuses.

However, parties do not enter into them because they are perhaps not given enough incentives to make it worth their while, while provisions in existing human rights treaties are ignored because there are insufficient provisions to enforce consequences. Just because it requires will to get to the point of states being willing to have provisions enforced upon them, does not mean it is impossible to get to the point where they will accept such a rule of higher law (as the article rightly points out with the great achievement of the supranational and somewhat toothed WTO), just as states in the U.S. South during segregation, despite being unwilling to integrate, did not attempt another secession--they eventually abided by the national law as adjudged by the Supreme Court and enforced by the national executive (whose chief I might add, as the commander of the armed forces was himself not even compelled by military threat to accept the court's decision which he personally did not favor--military force does not govern everything; there is also the force of legal precedent and tradition of abiding by legislation and court decisions as this demonstrates).

If the institutions can be reformed and a certain degree of greater international union achieved to willingly accept some constraints on sovereignty and accept international monitoring and enforcement, the power of human rights law will indeed carry a good measure of its own force.

I also do agree with the author's assignment of importance to economic growth in preventing rights abuses: an assessment mirroring the outcome of the Cold War debates over the relative importance of the human rights treaties themselves (one covenant being on civil and political rights and the other on social, economic, and cultural rights) which thankfully gave way to a recognition of their interdependence. Our trade protectionism, while necessary to a certain degree to avoid a too precipitous decline in local industries and uninformed populists or vested interests notwithstanding, keep the American consumer down as well as foster poverty and chaos abroad, not to mention aggravate attempts to get our goods accepted abroad. Trade war is indeed a war that has its own casualties. When other countries are given a chance for a higher standard of living, such as by fairer access to our agricultural market, there will not be as strong a temptation for crime, terrorism, illegal immigration and so on. It is not merely idealistic but also in our national self interest not only to gain access to other markets, but also to open access to our own.

2) While the discussion under "International Law Is a Worthy Goal" is, as with other sections, mostly legitimate and insightful in its contrasts, the unqualified conclusion it makes is not. While it is reasonable to question abiding by international laws which are forged in a piecemeal and bilateral fashion or which were adopted within an age of excessive reticence to intervene in states just coming out of imperial control (exactly as the states of the U.S. at the time of the Articles of Confederation or the newly independent African and Asian countries as the United Nations was forming), or which would be enforced by institutions whose legislature was not proportional to population or whose members did not represent their people, whose court lacked oversight, and whose executive members could unilaterally stall the will of the global republic by their vetos, this does not speak to the potential for a just and comprehensive order being established in which international law could be reasonably enforced, assuming the leadership and corresponding groundswell of support needed to get us there.

If national law is a worthy goal--and I don't think any sane and informed person can say that it is not--then international law is a worthy goal--not in and of itself, but with proper institutions progressively empowered to make and enforce it. Maybe I am not giving the author enough credit as he did focus on a difference between "means" and a "goal" (which may be more like what I am arguing), but I feel such a dichotomy obscures the discussion more than it helps. It should be our goal as well as means to create conditions where the rule of law is fully in place along with strengthened institutions to keep caprices of power fully in check, as we have already achieved to a great measure at local and national levels.

3) On a related matter brought up in the article, I take strong exception with the idea that "unification of countries...has little to do with the type of international law at issue in current debates, the kind of international law that involves all states around the world." It has everything to do with it. Humanity has found itself organizing into progressively larger states of organization, even while balancing at each step between the need for decentralization and efficient centralized power. National unification (as with tribal and city-state unification before it) is merely a smaller manifestation of the work of world unification today--unless that is, one holds to the untenable position rejected by science that there are inherent insurmountable differences in the races of the world.

The notion of race itself cannot be defined by scientists, except to say that there is agreement that we are a single species, despite regional variations. While social and political development do vary, admittedly far more than between the founding states of the United States or the integrating states of the European Union, cultural distinctions are not forever insurmountable, as the unification of the diverse components of those integrated states demonstrates. This highlights the need for efforts to promote a wider unity-in-diversity and foster positive relations among the different peoples of the world, as it is directly tied to our peace and security, as well as happiness.

4) While I agree that too ambitious schemes may fail, I also believe it is unfair to evaluate such attempts as complete failures. The League of Nations was the most remarkable achievement of humanity to that time. Even though it failed by withdrawal of support from its conceiver nation and by outright aggression by its permanent members, it set the precedent in its condemnation of Italy's aggression against Ethiopia, as the first time humanity had united as a whole to condemn national aggression and impose actual sanctions on it for doing so. While weak (as again, had also been the Articles of Confederation in the U.S.), it was a potent precedent which no doubt allowed its mistakes to be learned, and some of its aspects preserved, in the forming of the somewhat strengthened United Nations and international system. The World Trade Organization is another such amazing precedent, as was the recent indictment by the ICC of a current head of state. Whatever their immediate outcomes, they live on as powerful precedents, and will eventually be superseded by more effective replacements. While it is true that powers will indeed inevitably seek to override or ignore laws if they are formed by weak, non-representative, or unjustly constituted institutions, the possibility remains of making a sufficient number of self-interested sacrifices so that a binding institutional and legal framework can take root. We have done it before, and we can most certainly do it again.