</font>[/QUOTE]Um... Check the various Vienna Conventions and the UN Charter. I assure you no nation will ever take over another by use of force and have it be supported by the group of nations. I'm not being overly legalistic here, MagiK, we just don't work that way anymore. I challenge you to find me a situation where national borders have changed via force without the overwhelming majority of nations coming out, under UN sanctions, to punish the offender.

And, as I said, we drove Iraq out of Kuwait. Check the UN resolutions regarding the Gulf War - that was the extent of the US's approved use of force. You cite those same resolutions (and rightly so!) regarding Saddam, so don't throw them up as worthless when used in this vein. The US was to free Kuwait (you see- Saddam broke the rule I mentioned above, i.e. taking a nation by force) and hit Iraq hard enough to satisfy us all that it would not happen again. But, there's a reason the Stars and Stripes aren't flying in Baghdad right now - and it's not just 'cause Americans don't like deserts.

"The winners make the rules," is a rather generalized and antiquated view wouldn't you say? The ground rules of the League of Nations did not permit us to annex Japan after WWII, instead we just got to babysit it back to health - same with Germany. Those same rules form the basis of the UN.

Your idea challenges the very notion of sovereignty - which is the heart of all international law. It takes a momentous occassion and legal declaration to challenge sovereignty, and the group of nations, for years and years, has really only respected challenges to sovereignty when they came from inside a nation. Read the Declaration of Independence, because such a declaration of individual sovereignty is exactly what that document is, which should give you some clue as to how old this international law notion is.

That hardly makes it right though. If something happens all the time do you think we should excuse it, no matter how harmful? In all of the gun threads going around it appears to have been agreed that murder is quite a common occurrence, happens every day somewhere around the world...

See what I'm getting at...

That hardly makes it right though. If something happens all the time do you think we should excuse it, no matter how harmful? In all of the gun threads going around it appears to have been agreed that murder is quite a common occurrence, happens every day somewhere around the world...

See what I'm getting at...</font>[/QUOTE]Sure I see it. I said "too bad it's like that", but nations deal with each other on a different level that people do.

Yes, I understand the point. I just don't think that that is a good thing. Remember that arguing: "This is the way it is" doesn't tend to hold a lot of water with me. If it did I would hardly be a Socialist...

I see that that is how things are done and that it would be hard to change them, however I do not personally consider that fact any justification whatsoever. Unless you can prove to me the intrinsic "goodness" or "right" of the actions taken then I won't consider them such. I will, however, agree with you that they are the norm.

Edited for grammer.

[ 10-29-2002, 07:36 AM: Message edited by: Barry the Sprout ]

(...)All in all I would say we get caught so to speak less frequently than we might. </font>[/QUOTE]For some reason, I find this exchange hilarious. [img]graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]