The developing brouhaha over the legality of last year's war upon Iraq is instructive.

It has come to light that the UK's military commanders, just days before the outbreak of hostilities, refused to go to war without an "unequivocal" affirmation from Attorney General Lord Goldsmith. Goldsmith, initially hesitant, finally acceded--after, according to a new book, the Bush Administration advised Tony Blair to "get yourself some different lawyers."

The war's illegality is a slam-dunk: the Bush and Blair Administrations knew full well that a new resolution would not only be vetoed by France, China, and Russia; but also that it wouldn't even receive a majority vote in the Security Council. The Administrations also knew full well that Iraq posed no threat whatever to either its neighbors or to the Anglo-American "homelands", and that 90% of the world's population was virulently opposed to the war for this very reason.

Before the war's inception, any number of human rights organizations and NGOs warned that a war could kill tens of thousands of people, touch off a staggering refugee crisis, place the country's most vulnerable at grave risk, and cause environmental disturbances that would plague the country for generations.

The most dire of these warnings did not come to pass ("only" 20,000 - 50,000 Iraqis were killed during the war, for example)--perhaps owing in large part to the war's massive worldwide unpopularity having spooked the Bush Administration into scaling back its maximal bombardment scenarios. But the war was undertaken with the knowledge that a great many experienced and respected organizations believed that they could come to pass.

In short, we don't need a bevy of laws and lawyers to determine for us the immorality of the war, and the disregard for human life by its planners that its initiation signaled.

But this is the Bush Administration all over.

Take the case of depleted uranium--perhaps the most underreported story of the post-Cold War era. In 1996, the United Nations urged all states to be "guided in their national policies by the need to curb production and spread of weapons of mass destruction or with indiscriminate effect, in particular nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, fuel-air bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weaponry and weaponry containing depleted uranium..."

The United States proceeded to fire off both depleted uranium munitions and cluster bombs over Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq; as well as firebombs "remarkably similar" to napalm in Iraq.

So much for international law. The United States has known of the hazards of DU since at least 1991, when a since-leaked secret memo warned that, "There has been and continues to be a concern regarding the impact of DU on the environment." The memo continued, "Therefore, if no one makes a case for effectiveness of DU on the battlefield, DU rounds may become politically unacceptable and thus, be deleted from the arsenal."

And this is the basis upon which Colonel James Naughton defended the US military's use of Depleted Uranium at the outset of the second Gulf war: "In the last war, Iraqi tanks at fairly close ranges--not nose to nose--fired at our tanks and the shot bounced off the heavy armor...and our shot did not bounce off their armor. So the result was Iraqi tanks destroyed--US tanks with scrape marks."

Adding salt to the wounds, Naughton remarked that the Iraqis "want it to go away because we kicked the crap out of them."

Now let's think about this for a moment. Nobody had argued the effectiveness of the munitions--just as nobody had argued the effectiveness of "nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, fuel-air bombs, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weaponry".

By the Bush Administration's logic, Saddam Hussein could have rightfully argued that his gassing of the Kurds, having killed masses of people, should have been allowed to remain in his arsenal. That his phantom weapons programs, comprising as they did (in the words of George W.) "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised," should have been allowable.

Indeed, by this logic bin Laden could argue that hijacking jet airliners and slamming them into skyscrapers, this tactic having leveled the Twin Towers to the ground, are a perfectly lethal, thus perfectly acceptable tactic. We need not strain ourselves too much in imagining the reaction if bin Laden had offered that argument as justification for the 9/11 attacks, while speculating that the Americans were only sore because the hijackers had "kicked the crap out of them."

But the UN didn't urge "all states" to discontinue the use of weapons of mass destruction because of their effectiveness on the field of battle. It did so because of their destructive nature off the field of battle, and after the time of battle. It did so because "collateral damage"--especially widespread, indiscriminate "collateral damage"--is morally reprehensible.

For an Administration as steeped in the teachings of "the Christ," as hell-bent upon viewing the world in Manichean terms, as great a champion of the mores of the "civilized world," as abhorrent of "people that will kill on a moment's notice, and they will kill innocent women and children" as this administration professes to be, its legalistic song-and-dance in service of its commission of actions heretofore "utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy" are the more highly suspect--as any fool (or any five-year-old) should know.

Which makes the American public's and the mainstream media's willingness to applaud and/or ignore such machinations all the more distressing.

--Eddie Tews, Please find citations online at http://feedthefish.org/blog/archives/000274.html.