Enabling the Georgian War

Juan Cole writes in Salon about how the Bush administration's cavalier attitude towards international law is coming back to haunt the U.S.:

An emboldened Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sarcastically likened Russia's actions [in Georgia] to Bush's foreign policy.

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In the run-up to the Iraq war, Bush officials repeated ad nauseam the mantra that Saddam Hussein had killed his own people. Thus, they helped create a case for unilateral "humanitarian intervention" of the sort Putin says Russia is now pursuing.

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Indeed, Putin's invoking Bush's Iraq adventure points directly to the way in which Bush has enabled other world powers to act impulsively. With his doctrine of preemptive warfare, Bush single-handedly tore down the architecture of post-World War II international law erected by the founders of the United Nations to ensure that rogue states did not go about launching wars of aggression the way Hitler had. While safeguarding minorities at risk is a praiseworthy goal, the U.N. Charter states that the Security Council must approve a war launched for this purpose or any other, excepting self-defense. No individual nation is authorized to wage aggressive war on a vigilante basis, as Bush did in Iraq or Russia is now doing in the Caucasus.

This, of course, is the same "moral high ground" argument used against allowing torture. Once that U.S. cedes that ground, it is only a matter of time before another state attempts to use that argument in a manner we don't entirely approve of.