LINK: Apropos the recent rehashing of the Iraq debate here (and I do enjoy sparring with my intellectual interlocutors, especially the currently foreign-residing ones), norman geras has a good post explaining why process objections in foreign policy ultimately don't work out too well:
"Don't you need to have grounds which are independent of the war's not enjoying the support of the international community and its flouting international law in order to act in opposition to that war in the long run-up to it? Because if you don't have independent grounds for opposing it than these - call them for short procedural grounds - then you could be marching, agitating, writing letters and so on, to try to ensure that the war does get the support of the international community and is therefore authorized through the UN so that it does not flout international law. Hold this thought...
Especially if this is how you think, why wasn't the better course - than marching and speaking out against the war, doing so to the tune of hundreds of thousands of people all across the planet - to have used that global voice to try to sway the international community to bring an end to a butchering regime, giving the move the unambiguous, rather than as now disputed, imprimatur of international law; and in the process - because this is partly how international law evolves - shifting international law forward towards something more compatible with 'a humanitarian vision of world order'?"
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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