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Terry Glavin: Only cowards object to Iran war on 'international law' grounds

The Islamic regime is explicitly criminal, slaughtering its own people and sponsoring terrorists around the world

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It’s perfectly respectable to demand that the United States and Israel abide by the laws of war in the prosecution of the Americans’ ongoing Operation Epic Fury and the joint U.S.-Israeli Operation Roaring Lion, aimed at crippling and disarming the Khomeinist regime in Iran, if that is indeed the point of all this.

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And there’s certainly no shame in wondering how closely the Americans will abide by the Geneva Conventions, with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth getting his blood up this way: “No stupid rules of engagement, no nation-building quagmire, no democracy-building exercise, no politically-correct wars.”

Terry Glavin: Only cowards object to Iran war on 'international law' grounds Back to video

But to object to the American-Israeli war against the Iranian regime as a transgression of “international law” is to shroud the vices of moral indifference and cowardice behind a thin veil of juridical etiquette and diplomatic virtue. And there’s a lot of that going around at the moment.

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In a complaint typical of the manoeuvre, Victoria Liberal MP Will Greaves objected to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s apparent attempt to have it both ways — endorsing the American-Israeli effort to keep nuclear bombs out of Iran’s arsenal while being sad about the necessity of contravening the United Nations charter to do so, and saying so out loud.

“Canada cannot endorse the unilateral and illegal use of military force, the killing of civilians, or the kidnap and assassination of foreign heads of government,” Greaves said, “while also insisting that our sovereignty, our rights, and our independence must be respected.” It’s certainly fair enough to laud the rules embedded in the United Nations’ founding charter for having sustained Canada’s own sovereignty and prosperity over the past 80 years.

It’s another thing altogether to abandon the Iranian people to the notorious inconstancy and capriciousness of those same rules. It’s no better than an appeal from the first-class quarters of a luxury oceanliner to maintain the ship’s compass heading and leave the passengers of a sinking ship, encountered in the dark, to drown in the sea. And that’s the crux of the contradiction at the core of any argument for obedience to international law in the matter of Islamic Republic of Iran.

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Ever since the Khomeinists seized power in 1979, through their innumerable crimes against humanity, their contemptuous violation of every international law governing the rights of the Iranian people to life, liberty and security of person, to freedom of assembly and association, to freedom of opinion and freedom of religion and to protest, “international law” has required the Iranian people to drown in the dark.

This was evident even in the most recent deliberations of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, which was convened on January 23 to consider the overwhelming evidence indicating that the Iranian regime was engaging in arbitrary arrests, torture, and the mass slaughter of perhaps 30,000 people as its response to the most widespread wave of protests since the Khomeinists seized power in 1979.

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The UNHRC’s January judgment found the Khomeinists guilty of the most barbaric transgressions of the UN’s various human rights declarations and resolutions and charters. Even so, the compass heading should hold to its course, the UNHRC concluded, and the first-class passengers in Ottawa and London and Paris should remain undisturbed.

A pity about the victims and all that, but it was more important to accord “full respect for the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the UNHRC noted, privileging above all else the UN charter’s founding dictum of “friendly relations and cooperation among states.”

This brings us to the regime’s outward criminality. The Islamic Republic’s constitution commits the regime to its “continuation of the revolution at home and abroad.” The regime’s foundational foreign policy aims at the establishment of a single, global Islamic “universal community.” This is tantamount to a declaration that the whole point of the Islamic Republic of Iran is to defy international law by the bloodiest of means. It certainly isn’t what you could call a formula for amity among and between UN member states.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has won no friends in the Middle East, owing to the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and his government’s toleration of reckless provocations in the Arab communities of the West Bank. In post-Assad Syria, Netanyahu has gone out of his way to make enemies in a country that was celebrating Supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s demise last week as loudly as Israelis were.

But Israel owes nobody an apology for throwing its formidable military weight into the cause of crushing the hydra-headed international terror complex based in Tehran. Hectoring Israel for its role in the current convulsions can only sound tinny, given that Iran has remained loyal and true to the genocidal vow articulated by the regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, that Israel should be made to “vanish from the page of time.”

To achieve that purpose, and to further its own designs on a unified Islamist world, the Khomeinist regime set out from its earliest days to encircle Israel with a network of a dozen major terrorist organizations that fomented mayhem and death throughout the Greater Middle East, from Iraq to Yemen. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its overseas Quds Force financed, armed and trained Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, serving as well as the guarantor and armourer of Assad’s genocidal regime in Syria. The IRGC has further supplied the Kremlin with batteries of Shahed drones that continue to rain death and destruction upon the people of Ukraine.

All of these subversions and outrages against international peace and security are in direct contravention of any number of several provisions of international law, it should go without saying, and no amount of Obama-era nuclear peacemaking, Biden-era sanctions relief and other such suicidal adherence to the foundational articles of the UN charter have cajoled the mullahs to change their behaviour.

It’s true enough that Prime Minister Carney has given the appearance of speaking out of both sides of his mouth, first heartily endorsing the American-Israeli war, then deriding the Americans and the Israelis for acting in violation of international law and without consulting allies, then acknowledging that two decades of diplomacy and negotiation have gone nowhere, and then calling for de-escalation and a resumption of diplomacy and negotiation.

But it’s also true that President Donald Trump has ping-ponged from presenting himself as the cavalry coming to the rescue of Iran’s brutally terrorized protesters to a singular determination to smash the regime’s ballistic missile arsenal and destroy its weapon-launching and nuclear capability, to proposing that he jointly appoint the successor to Supreme leader Ali Khamenei in a Venezuelan-style collaboration and betrayal of the Iranian people, then identifying the regime’s “unconditional surrender” as the basis for an American victory.

President Trump’s “massive combat operations” were to last mere days, then maybe weeks, then for as long as it takes. Then he vowed the war would be over “very soon.” It would be perfectly consistent with President Trump’s style to declare victory, tomorrow, or weeks down the road, even in the face of humiliating defeat.

So say what you like about what the Americans and the Israelis are up to. But condemning their joint enterprise on the grounds that it violates international law is the refuge of cowards and hypocrites.

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