ABSTRACT
The early 1990s marked the end of the Cold War, which paralyzed the United Nations from its inception. The event was a cause for celebration and hope. Following the historic Security Council Summit Meeting of January 1992, the then Secretary-General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, spoke of a growing conviction ‘among nations large and small, that an opportunity has been regained to achieve the great objectives of the UN Charter – a United Nations capable of maintaining international peace and security, of securing justice and human rights and of promoting, in the words of the Charter, “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom”’.1 The spirit of this bold and idealistic statement had been echoed two years earlier by former President George H. W. Bush Sr’s statement to the United Nations General Assembly as United States and coalition forces were gathering to push Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of Kuwait:
Over a decade after ‘Operation Desert Storm’ and in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, a newly assertive United States has placed considerable strain on the existing international legal rules governing the use of force by reserving a right to use unilateral force and of course demonstrating that practically. Reacting to the legalities and justifications surrounding ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, Professors Richard Falk and David Kreiger observe:
The crusade against terror is not a sole US enterprise; many of its fears are shared by a large majority of the international community. The crusade should, however, not be allowed to numb states and the broader international community to the need
of international rule of law and the utility of international law as central pillars of the international community. ‘The attempt by the Bush administration to introduce a new principle of international law permitting “pre-emptive strike” by a nation against another, solely at its own discretion, represents a quantum, and highly dangerous, innovation. Were such a principle to prevail, we would have reversed decades of advances, modest but hard won, toward peace-making and returned to an era of dominance through might.’4
