Leviathan to the Rescue: The responsibility of the United States of America.

The approaching war with Iraq is essentially a 21st-century problem. Strictly speaking, it has no precedent in history, and in terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into unknown territory. By comparison, the Gulf War of the 1990s was a straightforward, conventional case of unprovoked aggression, like Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.

Yet I do not think Mr. Bush need hesitate to change the Iraq regime by force. Nor will he. He is quite clear on what he has to do. He can occupy Iraq by force under Security Council Resolution 678 of November 1990 and Number 687 of April 1991. To get further and explicit authorization from the U.N. is courteous but superfluous, and justified only by the need to line up as many allies as possible.

Moreover, Mr. Bush, and the United States, are lawfully empowered to take action against Iraq by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, which states plainly that nothing in the charter "shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense . . . until the Security Council has taken [the] measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." It is the last two words which are crucial. A year ago, the U.S. was subjected to an unprovoked attack of an unprecedented kind, which not only killed 3,000 people and destroyed much of the country's main financial district but was designed also to destroy America's legislative body and/or its executive, and its main defense headquarters. The scale of the attack, and the presumption that it would be followed by others, gave the U.S. the right, under Article 51, to punish the aggressors and to take all necessary steps to ensure its future security by destroying the source of their power, present and future.

Hence the occupation and regime-change in Afghanistan was merely the first move. The ferocity of the 11 September assault, designed to kill the maximum number of people and demolish the heart of America's government and financial strength, made it obvious that its perpetrators would use any and all weapons of mass destruction the moment they acquired them. Hence, to ensure its security, the U.S. is plainly entitled, under Article 51, to prevent this from happening.

There are two countries where sympathy for Moslem fundamentalist terrorists makes the possibility of supplying mass-destruction weapons likely. Pakistan already has a small arsenal of nuclear bombs. Mr. Bush has now satisfied himself that the present regime there will not supply them to terrorists and will prevent their theft. He would have an absolute right to prevent any change of regime, or indeed government, in Pakistan, if the consequences were likely to increase the risk of nuclear weapons' falling into terrorist hands. Granted Pakistan's instability and fragility, drastic steps such as the destruction of its nuclear stockpiles may still be necessary. Indeed the only long-term solution, desirable in itself, is the reunification of the Indian subcontinent, which ought to be an object of Western policy.

Iraq's consistent sympathy and active support for terrorist movements, and the regime's record of unprovoked aggression, make us presume that its consistent efforts to make a wide range of mass-killer weapons will end in their use, against either the U.S. or Israel or both. Whether the regime plans to use them itself or supply them to terrorists is a detail. It is clear that the only safety for the U.S. is to ensure that the program is scrapped once and for all, and the experience of the past eleven years shows that this can be achieved only by changing the regime. Thus a U.S.-led invasion having this object is lawful under Article 51 and a country's inherent right of self-defense.

What applies on the international plane applies a priori on the domestic one. It will be surprising if any substantial segment of opinion, inside or outside Congress, opposes the Bush resolve to end the threat from Iraq. The three basic tasks of government are to ensure external defense, to maintain internal order, and to operate an honest currency. ...