UK human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson has a confused, muddled, and revealing editorial in Bloomberg about how international law might help resolve the Iran nuclear crisis. While he describes the relevant law accurately, he fails to show how international law is doing much of anything to resolve the crisis.  Here is the relevant law, as he sees it: Israel has a right of self defense, but not to attack Iran even if Iran builds a nuclear weapon. The U.S. needs Security Council authorization to attack Iran (which it won’t get). Iran is allowed under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Agreement to develop a full nuclear cycle, and then withdraw from the NPT when its weapons are ready.  This might be correct, as a legal matter, but how does it help anything? It simply shows that existing international law permits Iran to get a nuclear weapon while preventing anyone else from doing anything about it.  So what’s his solution? Everyone else disarm.

According to the World Court — correctly this time — nuclear-armed countries have a legal obligation under Article VI of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty to negotiate a gradual disarmament, to zero. This might be done on a “first in, last out” basis, with North Korea being first to lose its bombs and a final ceremony to destroy simultaneously what is left in the Russian and U.S. arsenals — perhaps attended by the aging former U.S. and Russian leaders, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, circa 2045.

Umm…sure…that is going to happen. And that will work.  I thought lawyers were supposed to offer practical and useful solutions, not utopian fantasies.  I guess not when you are Geoffrey Robertson Q.C.

David French and Jay Sekulow respond to Bruce Ackerman’s legal argument about the use of force against Iran with a factual claim: Iran has already attacked the U.S.

There has, in fact, been an “armed attack” against the United States. Iran has been waging a low-intensity war against America and Israel — both directly and by proxy — for more than two decades. Iran’s Quds Force has planned and directed attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and on Israelis in Israel and abroad. Iran has directly supplied our enemies with deadly weaponry in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is responsible for hundreds of American military deaths — including the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.  

In other words, Iran attacked us long ago, and our forbearance to this point is neither required by international law nor does it bind us to continued forbearance. In fact, when a declared and hostile enemy escalates its military capabilities dramatically, that presents a direct challenge to American security and the security of our allies.

I don’t know if this is quite right, but it builds on my argument that there is a factual disagreement that will go to the heart of a legal analysis of the use of force. I don’t know if folks on both sides will ever be able to agree on the set of facts, before they even get to legal principles.