Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Lawyers Deliberate on Legitimacy of War whilst Islamists Are About to Strike with Lethal Weapons


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