Iran has retaliated,
unleashing its own strikes on US military bases, Israel, and other targets across the Middle East.
The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and many of his senior commanders has left Tehran’s future leadership in question.
Both Netanyahu and Trump have said that Iran was a danger to both their countries.
Waikato University international law professor, Al Gillespie, told The Front Page that the strikes seem to lack UN Security Council approval, violating the UN Charter.
“There is nothing in the UN Charter that says you can bomb someone who refuses to negotiate with you.
“So this, in theory, is an illegal action. It’s very similar to 2003 with the intervention into Iraq, which was also viewed as an illegal action. The problem is that there’s a very big gap between theory and practice.
“The legality question is also important domestically for Trump because he has gone around the authority of Congress to do this military strike, and in theory, the Constitution says that for offensive actions of war, as opposed to defensive, you should get the authority of Congress. Otherwise, the President has too much power,” he said.
Article 51 of the UN Charter allows countries to defend themselves, but only in response to an armed attack. Some interpretations allow action against an imminent threat, but there must be clear evidence of hostile intent.
“The UN Charter works on the assumption that every country has the right to self-defence without having to get Security Council approval. But it must be pre-emptive, or it must be in a situation where you are either struck, or there’s no alternative to defending yourself.
“And so the question is here, was there an alternative? Was there an imminent strike upon America about to happen, or Israel? And the answer is that’s very unlikely.
“That’s because their nuclear capability had been damaged recently with the American strikes and also over the relationship that they’ve had with the international community, trying to curtail their build-up,” he said.
The comparisons with the prelude to the 2003 invasion of Iraq are “quite striking”, Gillespie said.
“I think we’ve forgotten everything. It began in 2001 with the intervention into Afghanistan, and that’s a 20-year operation, you change the regime, it unifies the people against the invaders, and eventually you are pushed out the other side.
“You get to 2003, and you go into Iraq, and the result of Iraq wasn’t a change in regime, it was the rise of the Islamic State and extremists who tried to fill the void.
“When you go into Libya, you end up with a broken and chaotic country in the aftermath. You try to get involved in Syria, and you have a humanitarian catastrophe, which leads to the biggest refugee surges that we’ve ever seen towards the West.
“I am dumbfounded that no one is saying: ‘Why are any of these four examples good?’. They’re all failures, and yet that’s exactly where we’re going right now.
" But to start the war is easy ... to finish it; this could take years," he said.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- Regime dynamics
- The global precedent
- New Zealand’s reaction
- Where to from here?
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5pm. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.
You can follow the podcast at iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
