International Law's Painful Paradox

International law was created to act as a check on unrestrained power, yet in practice is only effective at controlling states who are willing to conform, leaving those states whom international law was intended to control practically untouched by it.

Out of the ruins of the Second World War came the concept of enforceable international law, followed by the creation of the United Nations and the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. International law promised a world devoted to upholding human rights, international peace, and security – and would leave no state with unchecked power.

The problem, however, which distinguishes international law from its domestic varietals, is that there is no sovereign authority to ensure its enforcement. No global police or army with a monopoly on the use of force. States decide for themselves whether to honour this international-social contract.

Paradoxically this system geared at freeing participant states most constrains those who uphold its principles and spirit most fervently, often allowing despots and dictators to do as they please.

International law shakes rather than stands up whenever force is required; disclosing a greater fear of intervention than tyranny. This use of force dilemma has consistently reappeared since the end of the Cold War.

The current war in Iran perfectly instantiates this paradoxical tension for the world to see. Western political leaders – self-appointed cheerleaders of human rights and liberal democratic norms and values – have become some of the strongest advocates against the war and its overthrow of the tyrannical Ayatollah.

Underlying this fear, and one of the greatest critiques from the pro-international law isolationists, is that the war echoes the Iraq War and is simply the Western powers intervening where they should not. The outcome of Iraq has become conflated with the justifications for war and presupposes that the Iraq War was unjustifiable. 

The brutality of Saddam Hussein and his regime is without question, given his use of chemical weapons, his genocide against the Kurdish population, and invasion of Kuwait. The tragedy of the Iraq War is not the removal of Saddam himself, but that his removal, and the subsequent military and post-Saddam political reconstruction, was not executed in the right way—a mistake Trump and Netanyahu must urgently avoid repeating.

The Iraq War, because of its failed outcome, has deleteriously haunted the West’s view of itself, its power and moral standing, for two decades now.

Instead of supporting the removal of the Ayatollah and his draconian tyranny, those who claim to stand for peace now stand staunchly against intervention, even as tyranny continues brutalising nascent Iranian democracy.

Critiquing this war as lacking a long-term vision is one thing; arguing against the right to take on the puppet-master of Hamas and Hezbollah is another.

Appreciating that much of the global debate has centred on protecting the sovereignty and security of states threatened by the Iranian regime – including Israel, Lebanon and Yemen – we must recall that the theocratic regime has made clear its intention to use nuclear weapons against Israel; and indeed that it bears culpability for October 7 through its funding, training and arming of Hamas terrorists.

A concrete plan is resultantly all the more important for long-term political stability and the safety of the Iranian people. A half-baked plan would be a missed opportunity on the road to a peaceful and prosperous Persia and would consolidate indefinite instability and concomitant danger.

This regime’s right to rule has long passed its sell by date; the US and Israel have a right to remove the destabilising stain on the Middle East that is the regime, but it must be done prudently and with the lessons of Iraq in mind.

Iran has repeatedly attacked Israel and made clear its intention to wipe it off the map: is that not a good enough justification for a war of self-defence?

A legal system that cannot decipher the difference between the removal of a dictatorship and the dictatorship itself becomes not a guard against, but an accessory to, tyranny.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Government Press Office of Israel (Kobi Gideon)

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