Release date: Sept. 18, 2002
Contact: Elaine Justice, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0643 or ejustic@emory.edu

Experts Say U.N. Involvement Will Make U.S. Decisions Tougher

With the possibility of a war against Iraq looming, United Nations involvement will make unilateral action by the United States an even tougher political alternative, say Emory University experts in international law and politics.

Despite the United Nations involvement and possible re-entry of U.N. weapons inspectors, some Emory experts are expressing doubts that the Iraq situation will play out in any straightforward way.

"The current phase will be a very interesting and complicated diplomatic one, a chess game of inspections," says Dan Reiter, associate professor of political science. He predicts there will be "competition on Saddam's part to do enough to satisfy members of the U.N. Security Council—to weaken U.N. support of military action—without giving up his weapons capability."

David Bederman, professor of international law, says the administration's decision to seek a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq was a welcome development, but "no one should think that the U.N. would oblige—at least in the way the Bush administration expects."

While it is likely the U.N. will authorize an ultimatum to Iraq to allow re-entry of U.N. weapons inspectors or face the consequences of a U.S.-led attack, says Bederman, "the U.N. is highly unlikely to give the United States carte blanche for a 'regime change' in Iraq."

Bederman warns that if Iraq's process of evasion and obstruction is renewed, the U.N. and European nations could nonetheless "declare victory, expound the advantages of multilateralism, even while no real progress is being made on Iraqi demilitarization." Worst of all for the Bush administration, says Bederman, "having gone to the well for U.N. authorization, the U.S. cannot then strike another politically viable unilateralist position."

Reiter agrees, pointing out that "at some point the administration's bluff will be called, and the U.S. will have to decide whether to go to war unilaterally; then Congress will have to decide whether it wants to approve unilateral action."

In Reiter's view, the threat from Saddam Hussein has been overstated. "Our current policies— which have kept Hussein from striking out for the most part—are better than a preemptive war," he says.

Larry Taulbee, associate professor of political science and terrorism expert calls potential war with Iraq "a big distraction" from the war on terrorism.

"I'm not persuaded that it is as central to the fight against terrorism as the administration seems to think it is," he says. "The fallout from this is interesting because the fight against terrorism has to be a multilateral fight. This is not something we can do on our own. The urge to go this track unilaterally has some very real costs involved."

One of the long-term costs, says Taulbee, is our ability to deal with regimes adjacent to Iraq that we need for information and intelligence.

"If we want to cut off the money supply to terrorists, which I think is critical, we certainly need to keep them relatively friendly," says Taulbee. "In my view, just on that dimension alone, an attack against Iraq is going to have tremendous fallout for U.S. policy over a long period of time."

Just as there are no easy political answers for the United States, there also are no easy solutions in international law. The events of Sept. 11 and subsequent war on terrorism present particular legal challenges to international law enforcement agencies, says Johan van der Vyver, Cohen Professor of Law and Human Rights. The attacks themselves do not fit neatly into the current definitions of armed conflict, he says, since they were not launched by a government, nor launched solely by an organized and armed group within the United States.

"The events of 9-11 made all the textbooks at my disposal obsolete. The attacks were an entirely new form, new level of belligerence that we cannot fit into the current definitions of armed conflict," says van der Vyver, who teaches courses on international humanitarian law covering the laws of armed conflict. International law lags behind in specifically addressing terroristic armed attacks, although international law agencies are working toward regulating terrorism more closely, he explains.

"We cannot sit back because the laws don’t fit," he says. "We have to react and work to find a solution."

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