A Waiter is standing over a Diner in a restaurant.
The Diner is reading the menu.

DINER
Not a great menu, is it. Not an extensive menu.

WAITER
It’s not a menu.

DINER
No, well, okay, I accept that, but even so, um, I’d like to order, um, a Siciliana

WAITER
You can’t order anything here. Do you seriously think you’re in a position to give orders?

(Long pause)
DINER
You know what, I think I’m going to eat elsewhere. I don’t care for your attitude

WAITER
If you’re smart, you’ll sit down and take what you’re given. And be grateful. (Shouts to the kitchens) One Pax Americana.

The Diner gets up.

WAITER
Siddown you!

The Diner meekly sits down

DINER
Could I have an arabiata? It’s a little more piquant than the siciliana and I’m partial to….

The Waiter slams a plate down in front of the Diner

WAITER
One Pax Americana

DINER
Could I have extra anchovies…?

WAITER
No.

END

Dick Cheney let it be known that he has informed George Bush that Iran will be the next target. Then an Iranian general let slip in a news report in Teheran that he thinks the US will definitely attack. Yet the Iranians go about their business with a resigned sang froid possibly not unconnected with the shia religion to which most (but not all) belong. According to the word on the Teheran street, they’re expecting to be heavily bombed, though a ground invasion is thought to be less likely and would, if it occurs at all, be very limited. This for several reasons: there will be a Shia backlash against all coalition forces in Iraq which will tie down US troops in the area; the Iranian forces will not be the push-over the Iraqis were; and it must be apparent to the brass at the Pentagon that there would be serious problems coping with another long term presence in what promises to be a very hostile country. Indeed, one of the staggering lessons to emerge from the debacle of the Iraq war is how poorly, following the initial three weeks fighting, the mighty US army has performed. Finally, of course, a large section of the US public has had its bellyful of Bush. And then there’s the expense…

Which is not to say that any of this will put George off. Far from it. He has God on his side (natch), and this time he has a whole new legal doctrine too.

George justified the Iraq invasion with what appears at first sight to be a modification of an old rule in international law, enshrined in Article 51 of the UN Charter, which allows a country to attack another if it is in imminent danger of being attacked. Imminent in this case means hours, not days or weeks. And the attack must be not just possible or probable, but actual. It would not be sufficient, for example, to attack an enemy merely because it was developing, or even actually possessed, nuclear weapons. You would have to show that a nuclear attack was imminent.

The Bush Doctrine, as it is now called, of Pre-emptive War (or Attack) is clever. It extends the right of self defence from imminent self-protection to the general prevention of any perceived threat from another country. This doctrine was presented to the American people, wrapped up in patriotic clothes, in Bush’s State of the Union message in January 2004 when he said ‘America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country’. Roughly translated this means that the US feels itself free to invade any country in the world if it feels like it without reference to the Security Council.

With its Iraqi adventure this American administration has comprehensively pissed all over the UN Charter (aiming its stream particularly at Article 51) and left the Security Council to ponder its collective impotence and marinate in its own juices. I’m reminded of that very under-rated comedy, Punch Drunk Love, where Adam Sandler has an outburst of uncontrollable anger in a restaurant and trashes the bathroom. The US has trashed the bathroom at the UN. All the rules of international law are in the toilet. In theory, any country could justify an attack on any other by saying it ‘felt threatened’. In practice, only the US (and under its diplomatic wing, Israel) together with the other swinging dicks on the Security Council, Russia and China, could possibly get away with it. But to say this is a frighteningly bad precedent (and one that has gone unchallenged for various jurisdictional reasons in the ICJ and the fledgling ICC) would be putting it mildly.

Iran’s position is that, while never being entirely pacifist, it has fought only defensive wars in the last several centuries. There’s no doubt that recently it has fomented unrest in the Middle East (through Hezbollah), but beyond being furiously angry with Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, there is no evidence that it has any connection with Al Qaeda. The Ayatollahs may be very weird, but they aren’t crazy, and though they clearly want a nuclear weapon as a strategic balance to Israel’s power in the region, on no sensible analysis is it sustainable that they would resort to a first strike. They will indeed have taken note of the defensive possibilities of nuclear weaponry, and particularly that the US has carefully refrained from invading North Korea which as we know, despite recently decommissioning of one nuclear reactor in return for oil, remains a deeply unpleasant regime run by a nutjob with a small but perfectly formed nuclear arsenal. The Iranians will also be aware that Saddam would never have been attacked if it had been apparent that he had nuclear weaponised missiles at his disposal. The possession of nuclear weapons, regrettably, is still the best insurance against invasion by another state you can get. This is well understood in, for example, Israel.

Even acknowledging its nuclear ambitions, and accepting that Ahmedinejad is given to unseemly and aggressive posturing (his decision to host a holocaust conference in Teheran must go down in diplomatic history as one of the most tasteless gestures imaginable), by no stretch of the imagination could Iran be said to be a threat to the territorial integrity of the US. But so what. Under the new Bush doctrine a country could be as cuddly and woolly as a Marino sheep, but it could be made to seem threatening. It would do fine.

Inevitably, it would not be wide of the mark to suggest that Cheney’s principal aim for attacking Iran will be to promote regime change (all completely illegal under the UN Charter, if anyone’s interested), which in turn may not be unconnected with the fact that the Ayatollahs are, with approximately 132 billion gallons (as compared with the US’s mere 28 billion), sitting on the largest reserves of oil of any country in the world after Saudi Arabia.

When the attack comes, will the US hit Iran’s reactors itself or get the job done by proxy through its client state Israel? The Israelis have form here – in 1981 they attacked and destroyed Saddam’s Osirak reactor in a single sortie and certainly their pilots can be relied upon to do the job as professionally as any American. But it looks as though the Americans, with carriers now massing in the Gulf, will see to the matter, and will sustain the attack for days or weeks.

The Bush Doctrine of Pre-emptive invasion is in fact a manifestation of a much older principal – which pre-dates the sophistications of the Charter of the UN, the Geneva Conventions, the Hague Conventions on War before them. Indeed it reaches back before the Enlightenment and before even the Treaties of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War in the 1630s, when the theoretical principle was first enunciated that irrespective of a state’s power, it is entitled to respect for its territorial integrity. No, we have to go much further back to the origins of human history, to a time when all our ancestors lived in Africa and wore very little, if anything at all, to discover the roots of the principle which, simply stated, says that might is right.

Ultimately, it will be in America’s profound long term interests to support and respect the rule of international law. In Punch Drunk Love the Maitre D of the restaurant firmly and quietly escorts Adam Sandler off the premises. Similarly, George Bush and his Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Attack need to be shown the door…