Iranians Learning “Might Makes Right” in War?

Letter to Romans: When will US plainly argue it’s OK when its laws wedded to inalienable human rights are at odds with international law based largely on raw political power? Any better example than today’s UN empathy for Islamic Republic & its ICC creation over USA & Israel?

Consider the spectacle of President Trump calling out Iran at the United Nations for its indisputably documented terrorist atrocities against foreign & domestic foes alike for 50 years now … and Iran’s president insisting a day later it’s the United States that has terrorized his blameless nation by blowing up is nuclear bomb mountain hideout & murderous leaders. Both alluded to “international law” that supposedly criminalizes each other. Yet, as Lincoln once suggested, “Might makes Right.” He also reminded the law as well as God cannot be on both sides in war. Speaking of which, as historian Shelby Foote observed, Honest Abe, was not exempt during the American Civil War from the difficulties of dealing with that fickle “international law.” He found out the hard way, e.g., that by blockading the Confederacy’s ports to economically strangle it, international law at the time ironically conferred special & very favorable belligerent status to the rebels in all the courts of Europe. “Yes, that’s a fact, I see the point now,” Lincoln told SoS Seward. “I’m a good enough lawyer in a western law court, I suppose … but I don’t know anything about the Law of Nations.”

Could it be, then, that old interpretation of international law means Trump’s current blockade of Iran’s ports to economically strangle it confers favorable “belligerent rights” in the world’s capitals to the very belligerent Iranians? And should Trump, therefore, do as Obama & Biden did, “load up planes filled with cash, fly them to Iran,” and even beg for forgiveness? Something tells me ‘Ol backwoods lawyer Abe would counsel Trump with a wink that his country’s marriage to “inalienable human rights,” coupled with his own timeless “Right Makes Right” prosecution of the Civil War (to ensure those human rights aka end slavery), trumps anything the Iranians want to pretend to see in today’s international law.

Davd Soul