Status Updates From Of War and Law

It is not surprising that discussions of the Iraq war were filled with wild fantasies about who “really” was behind the whole thing—the neocons, Bush’s obsession with his father, the exiles, Cheney, the Israelis, the oilmen—or simply the “hegemon,” whoever that is.

We know the corporate world can kill. (...) Somehow we thought war was different. But it turns out not to be. Violence is one tool among many. And the injuries of wartime are also permissible, privileged, structured by law. In war as in peace, the costs of uncompensated damage are shared and allocated by law.

Only those who could tell the difference between war and peace, clearly, definitively, seemed to have any hope of limiting war’s violence.

why shouldn’t military operations be judged by their effects, rather than by their adherence to narrow rules that might well have all manner of perverse and unpredictable outcomes?

Law has become a mark of legitimacy—and legitimacy has become the currency of power.

The international political system today is a far more complex multilevel game than the rows of equivalent national flags arrayed at UN headquarters would suggest. States and their governments differ dramatically in powers, resources, and independence. There is something audacious—and terribly misleading—about calling them all states and respecting their nominal leaders as “sovereign.”

Nearly two hundred years after he made the observation, Clausewitz remains correct: war is still the continuation of politics by other means.

"May the human freedom of responsible decision be the vocation of our politics"

cannot believe i got through that chapter

neat