Mary Ellen O’Connell is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame, a friend and former colleague of mine at OSU, and the owner of one of the sharpest minds of anyone I know. Well before the Iraq War began, she regarded the U.S. invasion as an act that would damage respect for international law and our nation’s moral standing in the world community. She wrote this column for the March 19 issue of The Jurist:
On this fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War, one clear, decisive lesson is not even mentioned in the New York Times survey of opinion on the war (March 16, 2008, Opinion Pages, pp.12-13) or, indeed, in any of the many places one would expect to find it. Five years on, the most tangible lesson of Iraq is that our nation ignores international law at its peril.
Going into Iraq, we ignored the UN Charter, which prohibits the use of force except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. Once in Iraq, we ignored the Hague Regulations, requiring us to put a stop to looting and to make only necessary changes to local law and government. We ignored the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit secret detention and abuse of prisoners of the kind we saw at Abu Ghraib.
The talk on Iraq is all about what went wrong, whether the surge is working, and when we can get out. We hear virtually nothing about international law and look set to repeat our mistakes. Violating the law has cost our nation and Iraq dearly. It has denied us the guidance of rules based on long experience and moral consensus. We have lost standing in the world, a literal fortune, and precious lives. Rather than internalizing the lesson of law violation in Iraq, we continue to defy the law in serious and self-destructive ways.
