We Need A Global War Powers Resolution

The times has come to do something about the scourge of war.

It is shocking that, in the twenty-first century, the interacting of the minds of two men could cause a world war affecting all human beings everywhere. Despite the notoriously impulsive nature of their personalities, much analysed by commentators, these two men could have known that the Strait of Hormuz would be a crux of a war against Iran and that the tentacles flowing from interference with this geographical feature would reach to the ends of the Earth.

‘From that moment, Your Majesty and I were at war.’

 Napoléon I^er, French Emperor, letter to Czar Alexander I of Russia (1 July 1812). 

 J.M.Thompson, Letters of Napoleon (1934), 310.

In 1812, two other men started a great war. For one of them it was the beginning of his end. For the hundreds of thousands of casualties of the war, it was the premature termination of their lives.

The war waged by Israel and the United States against Iran is unlawful under international law.  It is in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter. It cannot benefit from Article 51 of the Charter since it was not in response to an armed attack by Iran or an imminent threat of an armed attack.

It is shocking that there is no effective action that other states can take to stop the war, notwithstanding its illegality, not least because one of the state-parties to the war is a veto-holding permanent member of the UN Security Council.

The Iran war is also unlawful under US law. Article 1.8 of the Constitution gives to Congress the power to declare war. Congress did not declare the war against Iran.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 requires the President to notify Congress within 48 hours of deployment of US forces in armed conflict. It requires their withdrawal if Congress does not approve of their deployment within 60 days (which may be extended to 90 days). The Iran war was not so notified.

In passing judgment on the legality of the war and mitigating its effects in international humanitarian law, international law gives a veneer of rationality to the survival of a form of human social behaviour which is, and always has been, a gross form of evil that disgraces the human race.

“And the result of all this is, that war is now such an accepted thing that people are astonished to find anyone who does not like it; and such a respectable thing that it is wicked  (I nearly said heretical) to disapprove of the thing of all things which is most criminal and most lamentable.  How much more reasonable it would be to turn one’s astonishment to wondering what evil genius, what a plague, what madness, what Fury first put into the mind of man a thing which had been hitherto reserved for beasts – that a peaceful creature, whom nature made for peace and loving-kindness…should rush with such savage insanity, with such mad commotion, to mutual slaughter “’ “What is war, indeed, but murder shared by many, and brigandage, all the more immoral for being wider spread?  But this view is jeered at, and called scholastic ravings, by the thick-headed lords of our day.”

 The ‘Adages’ of Erasmus (1515 edition) (tr., M. Phillips; 1964), 310, 320.

 “And the horrible business familiar for ages will begin again.  The journalists will get to work, egging men on under the guise of patriotism to hatred and murder… The factory-owners, the merchants, the purveyors of army stores, will gleefully get to work, expecting double profits… And drowning the despair in their hearts with singing, debauchery, and vodka, torn away from peaceful labour, from their wives, their mothers and their children, hundreds of thousands of simple, good-natured men, with weapons of murder in their hands, will trudge off where they are sent.  They will march; will be frozen, will be hungry, will be sick, dying of disease; until at last they reach the place where they will be murdered by thousands, and will themselves, not knowing why, murder by thousands men whom they have never seen, who have done them no wrong, and can have done them no wrong.”

 L.N. Tolstoy, Christianity and Patriotism (1894) (tr., C. Garnett; 1922), 36-37.

Tolstoy was discussing the crazy Alliance System of the 1890’s. He said it would lead to war, as it did in 1914.

The range of canon fire increased over the centuries, until it reached beyond the horizon.  Now, with the development of missiles and drones and cyber systems, war can be conducted at a great distance, maybe even  thousands of kilometres, so that the murder of a particular person or the mass murder of human beings and the carpet bombing of buildings are separated from the consciousness, especially the moral consciousness, of those who are responsible for pressing the buttons. 

It is shocking that we speak of the human cost of a war in terms of statistics. We say that there were umpteen million casualties of the Second World War. We do not even know the actual number. Every single human death in war is a human tragedy.

Discussion about a so-called just war is pointless. Every war-maker believes that their war is just. An aggressive war may be represented as anticipated self-defence. A genocidal war may be represented as the removal of a threat to the ethnicity of the war-maker.

It is shocking that progress in the machinery of war, up to and including nuclear, bacteriological and chemical warfare and now cyber warfare has led us to a point where war threatens the survival of the human species.

A new collective consciousness has emerged about the damage which the human species has done and is doing to its environment on Earth and about a hazardous human future.

The time has come for a new collective coming-to-consciousness about the perennial evil of war. The fact that war has been a presence throughout recorded human history is no reason for believing that its savage insanity, to echo the words of Erasmus, must continue to be a presence in the human future.

National constitutions typically involve representatives of the people in the making of war, given that it is the citizens who will pay for the war in taxation and it is the citizens who may lose their lives as members of the armed forces or as collateral damage.

The Uniting for Peace Resolution of 1950 – UN General Assembly res. 377 (V) – asserted the separate responsibility of the General Assembly in the maintenance of international peace and security. It was a response of the international community to excessive use of the veto by permanent members of the Security Council.

The preamble to the Resolution includes the following –

“Recognizing in particular that such failure [of the Security Council to exercise its primary responsibility] does not deprive the General Assembly of its rights or relieve it of its responsibilities under the Charter in regard to the maintenance of international peace and security…”

Uniting for Peace thus affirms that the UN General Assembly has its own responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. The General Assembly represents all the people of the world.

Globalisation and integration of the human world over recent decades mean that most inter-state wars are now in practice world wars, impacting the global economy and affecting national life everywhere.

It may be that the time has come to consider whether the people of the world, represented in the General Assembly, should be involved in the control of wars.

The War Powers Resolution adopted by the US Congress in 1973 is, in principle, an excellent method of ensuring that the people are involved in the making of war, even if US Presidents have ignored the Resolution or treated it with disdain. It would be possible to involve the General Assembly, representing all the people of the world, in the control of war in a way analogous to the American War Powers Resolution.

Global War Powers Resolution

1. The purpose of this resolution is to ensure that the collective judgment of the Members of the United Nations is applied to the use of force by one or more states against or in the territory or one or more other states.
2. The government of a state using force against or in the territory of another state shall submit a report to the President of the UN General Assembly within 48 hours of the commencement of hostilities, setting forth (a) the situation giving rise to the commencement of hostilities; (b) the lawfulness of the hostilities under international law and the national constitutional law of the state instigating the use of force; (c) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities; and (d) the application to the hostilities of international humanitarian law.
3. Within sixty calendar days after a report is submitted or is required to be submitted pursuant to section 2, whichever is earlier, the state or states instigating the use of force shall terminate the hostilities, unless the General Assembly has determined otherwise, having regard to international law.
4. The General Assembly may recommend the application of sanctions against a state that fails to comply with a determination of the General Assembly under section 3.