The Bush administration's determination to topple Saddam Hussein has rearranged conventional theories of international law -- the body of treaties and opinions by which nations navigate through conflicts ranging from the rate of tariffs to the throw weight of missiles.

Should President Bush defy the United Nations and launch a war against Iraq, critics say he will violate the U.N. Charter and rules that allow defensive wars only when the U.N. Security Council enacts a resolution of support.

International law experts supporting the president say the definitions of "defensive war" now on the books were written at a time that never envisioned suicide hijackers and terrorist cells that strike with neither warning nor in the uniform of a nation.
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state from warring upon another, granting an exception in Article 51 for cases of self-defense -- notably in response to an armed attack. Another section of the charter requires any state that considers itself under threat to seek a resolution of support in the Security Council as opposed to taking unilateral preemptive action.

The United States has invoked Security Council Resolution 1441 as the basis for its assertion that military authorization is necessary. The resolution, passed unanimously on Nov. 8, reasserts an earlier U.N. resolution demanding that Iraq destroy its weapons of mass destruction and refrain from human rights abuses.
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"It's a set of really basic but flexible rules that are designed to govern nations but don't necessarily do so," said Thornburgh. "If there were indeed an international law, Saddam Hussein would long ago have been called to the bar of justice and we wouldn't have him on our hands."
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"The tensions we've created with our allies and with the rest of the world are going to come back and haunt us," said Jules Lobel, a professor of international law at the University of Pittsburgh."Power unconstrained by law can have short-term success. But in the long term I think the history of the last two centuries has shown it's law that brings stability and not raw power."

As stability and power contested before the U.N. Security Council Friday, the Bush administration made clear its willingness to proceed without a resolution authorizing force. Whether that would produce undesirable long-term effects was as unclear as what, precisely, rests in Saddam Hussein's bunkers.

"Everybody talks about this as a bad precedent for international law," said David Bederman, a professor and former State Department adviser at Emory University in Atlanta. "I have a radical theory. Incidents like this don't make for legal precedents."

Part of the reason, says Bederman, is that armed confrontation almost always overwhelms written codes. The other is that in international law "things are deliberately left ambiguous. Constructive ambiguity they call it."

» Impending Iraq war raises an array of questions about international law