international law 101

Miguel posted something very interesting on international law in his weblog.
He uses a nice analogy of a village and its inhabitants to illustrate the relations between countries in the world.

An analogy is helpful to illustrate complicated facts in a simple way. Of course, simplifications bear the risk not to be precise enough. Also, since matters are usually not that simple they can be interpreted differently by some people. Therefore someone may tell another story of that village. I disagree with some parts of Miguel's story. I would like to point them out here. Please read his post first, otherwise mine doesn't make any sense.

I will give some names to the peole involved (to make it easier following the story):
The person who supposedly has the candlesticks is called Saddam
The person who is acting informally as the sherif is called George.
Miguel named George's best friend Tony, already.

Ok, what had happened? (Caution: some major differences here to Miguel's story)
The village has rules but not a sherif to enforce them. Usually the villagers enforce the rules as they see fit.
Someone had broken into George's house destroyed something he was really proud of and roughed up his wife.
No candlesticks have been stolen. The person breaking in was not Saddam but Osama. While Saddam probably enjoyed the fact that Osama broke in, it remains unclear if he was supporting Osama in doing so.

Everything else is like in Miguel's story up to the point were George calls Tony and they go to Saddam's house. Let us be clear on some circumstances here:

George is not looking for candlesticks but for a machine gun. It hadn't been stolen but sold by George's ancestors as well as by some other villagers.
Now, Saddam claims not to have been involved in the break in. He claims that he does not have the machine gun anymore. The village council actually wanted to investigate the matter but Saddam was only reluctantly letting them enter his house. Too slow for George.

So the house is being dismantled. By now George and Tony have dismantled half of the house. The machine gun has not been found, yet. By now George has acused a neighbor of Saddam to hide the machine gun for him. That neighbor has a history of disliking George as well as Saddam, though.
By now, basically George has announced that he would have to look into every of the neighboring houses. Some of the other villagers are questioning George's motif. They are suspicious that he may have been looking for excuses to enter their houses. Maybe he just wants the extremely good soil in that area of the village. Most villagers urge for a meeting to discuss everything before more harm is done. There are people in the village who also have interests in Saddam's house. A guy called Jaques and another one called Vladimir had made agreements with Saddam about the use of Saddam's soil. They don't want someone else in that house.

By now, George has shifted his arguments. He doesn't really seem to care about the gun, he emphasizes that Saddam had beaten his wife and children. George wants to free them from their oppression. After Saddam is removed, he wants to take care of them for a while before he will let them decide on their own about what to do. The familiy indeed had suffered from Saddam. However, some family members fear that George wants to get the goodies in the house and the right to use Saddam's soil before givng them their freedom.

Saddams neighbors don't like the whole plan. They are distant relatives of Saddam and feel that Saddam's family will be forced to live life George's way. They feel threatened, that George might try to change their own way of life, too. Also, if Saddam will lose his house why shouldn't they get the goodies? They really don't like the idea, that George will decide on where these goodies go to. Some of Saddam's neighbors have also maltreated their families in the past. Up until now, neither George nor any of the other villagers had shown great interest in that matter. They were too interested in trading goods with each other. Is George going to remove them as well? On what grounds? Up until recently all the villagers had agreed not to interfere with matters that only concerned members of a single household.

Also, many familiy members in the houses of Saddam's neighbors feel more threatened by George coming into their houses than by their patriarchs.

So some villagers keep calling for meetings in order to settle the issues without violence, by way of compromise. They want to investigate the matter.
George doesn't want that. He may want the other villagers to help in rebuilding Saddam's house later, though. People wonder why the whole village should pay for rebuilding the house because most of them didn't want to destroy it in the first place. But of course, Saddam's family needs shelter. So they will eventually agree on rebuilding the house. George will have to pay, too. But at least he gets the goodies in return.

Saddam's neighbors fear that soon George will start to dismantle another house if he wants more soil, more goodies. Nobody can prove that, but the suspicions are there. This is why mistrust, or even hatred and vioence may occur. Many factors suggest that George may have (accidentally) started something that leads into a large scale feud splitting the village into two or more factions. In the end, most houses might be damaged if not destroyed.

How can this be resolved?
Joint action is the only way to really SOLVE the problem. If Osama and Saddam get their way, then maybe the whole village will sink into chaos and destruction. If George continues the dismantling and walks into other neighborhood houses, the same thing may happen.

The rules set by the community are the only hope to exit the vicious circle of destruction. Some villagers have seen that and have remained calm and rational and these people try to make the community work.

Bottom line: international law exists but is often rather vague and difficult to enforce. The USA can not be sued and sanctioned by the UN for taking matters into their own hands. (point taken)
But the decision to go to war was still wrong:
parts of the UN (for example the German government) pleeded to bear the goal of peace and stability in mind and argued that war on Iraq is counterproductive.

Only joint action in the UN can break the vicious circle of violence. Therefore, everybody should help to make international law stricter and easier to enforce.
A UN-super-state doesn't exist. Probably it shouldn't even exist. It would be hard to administer such a monster. But moves need to be made into that direction if we want to break the rule-of-the-fist. It is dangerous to be happy with the rule-of-the-fist only because one is the strongest. Envy, hatred, famine... a lot of things make this planet insecure, even for the strongest.

The safest way is cooperation on a supernational level. That is why we have international law. We should enforce it.
I said, we should enforce it. America, doesn't. It only enforces a small portion of it against the will of many/most members of the UN because it wants Iraqi oil. America seems not to agree in the need to break the vicious circle. America does not believe in supernational cooperation it only believes in national interest. I think I have pointed out, why that is a short sighted attitude.