Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Forgive and forget?
Stephen Zunes has an excellent article out today detailing his thoughts on why we cannot "forgive and forget" those (like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards) who voted to authorize the invasion of Iraq. He notes that, by their vote, they implicitly renounced the U.N. Charter and the United States' obligation to obey international law.
One thing he writes about which I had forgotten is the reason I'm posting this. That is that there was a resolution in Congress which authorized force against Iraq if authorized by the UN Security Council (not that I believe that was an acceptable course of action, but it would at least have been legal according to international law), and that that resolution was voted down by a bipartisan majority.
The final vote in the Senate on the authorization of force resolution itself is here. Zunes doesn't mention it, but in the vote to make that authorization contingent on a UN resolution, the nays included all the Presidential candidates - Clinton, Edwards, McCain, Dodd, Biden, and Brownback. All explicitly rejected required authorization from the U.N., that is, all of them explicitly rejected obeying international law.
