The biggest problem often is that “peoples” are theoretically guaranteed the right to divorce, but territory isn’t. Yet necessarily and thus inevitably, separating “peoples” wants to break off chunks of territory with them. And the United Nations Charter which guarantees the right to secede says nothing about how maps are redrawn. So what becomes of the map when one “people” decides to withdraw?
So basically Obama is out of compliance. He has made a calculation to ignore what the written rules say, because history is on his side. Unfortunately, as far as the law goes, that bet is almost certainly right.
It may have been lousy intelligence. It was effective public relations, however. In February 2003, 72 percent of Americans polled answered yes to the question: “Was Saddam Hussein personally involved in the September 11 attacks?” And this result was in line with poll after poll.
In the global war on terror or, as the Bush Administration likes to call it, the GWOT, the U.S. aspires to the situation of a National League team in interleague play — relaxed rules. This time we consider three aspects of the relaxed GWOT away game we are playing these days: foreign assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and prisoner export.
When the International Committee of the Red Cross reported in February 2004 on our various Iraqi detention centers, they noted that at all of them, there seemed to be a single playbook – the real playbook – of practices focusing on the sexual and religious humiliation of those detainees deemed “high value,” i.e. most likely to yield Actionable Intel.
With good leadership, with Eisenhowers and Roosevelts, young men and women will predictably enlist in acceptable numbers. With bad leadership, the discipline of the enlistment market will act as a check. It would be both foolhardy and morally wrong to remove that check.