By Con George-Kotzabasis
August 11, 2016
It is amusing to hear peripatetic academics deliberating
in the midst of war the legitimacy of the war, as fanatic Islamist warriors are
about to strike the West with lethal weapons and indeed, with nuclear ones,
once they get hold of them. Such ‘deliberations’ place academics in the
ludicrous position of Nero, in this case, playing their legalistic fiddle
whilst the world is about to be burned.
No war can be prevented or stopped by the
prescriptions and dicta of International Law, especially when one of its actors
is completely
irrational and truly believes that his Commander-in-Chief is Allahu Akbar. War creates its own
legitimacy both for its aggressors and defenders and neither of them take
notice of the pronouncements of International Law on the legal status of an
ongoing conflict.
To paraphrase Thucydides, in a hostile world only the
strong—not the just--who are prepared to use overwhelming force, have the right
to indulge in hope.
Hence your argument before those historical facts is
hopeless and inutile. Further, it commits Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced
concreteness as it substitutes the legalistic abstractness of war for the
concrete reality of war. And more ominously such deliberations are
strategically doltish, and indeed risky, as they tend to mislead and divide the
people as to the justice of the war, in contrast to the absolute necessity of
uniting them for the purpose of winning it against these irreconcilable
fanatics.
Also, when you correctly state that the US declared
war against Al Qaeda this declaration does not apply to ISIS, since the latter
has no association with the former and was not involved in the attack of 9/11, and
indeed the two groups are in conflict with each other, therefore the war
against it is illegitimate, I’m afraid you lose the wood for the trees. The
legitimacy of the war should not depend on the different religious and
ideological nuances of the two groups but on their firm common goal of destroying
the 'great Satan,' America, and the rest of the western world. It is this deadly
existential threat that western leaders have to meet head-on.
The eminent German jurist and political philosopher,
Carl Schmitt, has stated, that legal norms apply in normal circumstances but in
emergency conditions the ‘non-legalistic’ decision of the ruling body to go to
war is preponderant over the norm.
No comments:
Post a Comment