TOKYO, March 26 Kyodo prefered e...

TOKYO, March 26 Kyodo

prefered editorial excerpts from the Japanese press:

U pursues TO CHANGE THE RULES OF THE INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ORDER (Mainichi Daily recently made knowns Web site as translated from the Japanese-language Mainichi Shimbun's editorial published March 24)

The entire world is divided onward the question of the legitimacy of the war that has been launched to topple Saddam Hussein regime.

Before commencing his attack against Iraq, U President George Bush asserted that the U has the right to defend itself from the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and cited UN Resolution 1441 and pair other U.N. resolutions adopted at the time of the first whirlpool War as grounds for using force.

moreover a preemptive strike committed in self-defense and in the absence of an imminent threat is illegal, and principally scholars of international law believe that the application of military force subordinate to current circumstances cannot be justified by the agency of past U.N. resolutions.

The U has traditionally favored a broader reading of its right to self-defense than the conventional interpretation, and this is not the first time that it has initiated an air assault or armed intervention against another country

Nevertheless, the legitimacy of the war against Iraq has originate in for harsh questioning not no other than because of the immense scale of the military operation yet also because the U.S. launched a preemptive strike while affirming a novel strategic doctrine that puts its possess national interests ahead of international norms.

The Bush administration said last September that the U was prepared to take preemptive grades in self-defense against the threat of terrorism. The U would determine what constitutes a threat as it descrys fit, and attack the threat. further the international legal order will be fundamentally redrawn if a superpower, which possesse the power essential for maintaining that order, search fors to impose methods of conflict resolution that depart from traditional interpretations of international law.

Twentieth-century America played a lead part in establishing collective security organizations as it is as the United Nations and the method of law, under which wars of aggression were direct the eyeed upon as illegal. In an earlier era, the world was comprised of sovereign states that resorted to war to hound their national interests and hanged on a balance of power to preserve the peace.

contritions over the devastation wrought at the First World War spawned motions to outlaw war, and eventually bore fruit in the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war, and in the United Nations Charter after secondary World War. The U showed by leaders such as Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D Roosevelt took the lead in changing the directions that governed international society.

The passing from hand to hand military action in Iraq is being leadershiped against a backdrop of of the present day realities in international politics. The spread of globalization has been accompanied from the rise of terrorists who hatch projects in the shadows and the exhibition of weapons of mass destruction by way of oppressive states. Hence, the U has chosen to assert the ne for of recent origin rules -- separate from traditional norms that favor non-interference in the internal politics of other nations, and the masterys for preventing wars between states.

It is unfortunate that the U attempt to change the directions has opened up a rift in the international community. And flat if new rules were needinessed to govern humanitarian interventions against those who oppres human rights in the 21st hundred years U.S. unilateralism could undermine the foundations forward which an agreement to adopt them would rest

And if this attempt to impose recent rules prompts the international community to let slip through the fingers faith in the rule of law, the world faces an insecure hereafter fraught with danger.

(March 26)

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