So the BBC is talking about some US soldier who deserted his unit claiming the Iraq war is illegal under international law and requesting asylum in Canada. Lately I’ve been getting more and more upset with the BBC for soft balling and pandering to obviously absurd little emotional attitudes whenever it has these little discussions/interviews.

The first thing which pissed me off about this interview, like pretty much everything I hear about the Iraq war from Europe these days, is the unchallenged insistence that the Iraq war was illegal under international law. Since I have yet to see any detailed legal argument from this position and most people seem to convince themselves of these claims by misinterpreting technical legal language (war of aggression) it is appalling that I never hear the BBC interviewers challenge this. As far as legal technicalities go I don’t even know if we ever formally ceased hostilities with Iraq after the first gulf war (we signed a cease fire then but I don’t think a peace treaty was ever signed) and even if we were any number of security council resolutions made the war legal. Sure it may have gone against the spirit of international law but this is really irrelevant. I don’t understand how it can’t be blindingly obvious to everyone that this business about the gulf war being illegal is just emotional clap-trap.

Even worse the BBC just let this guys assertion/argument that he shouldn’t be forced to do something he felt was immoral without comment. Apart from posing absurd practical problems any such rule would license virtually any sort of behavior, including (at least passive) instances of man-slaughter/murder. Nor did any part of the interview/discussion consider the tough questions of what general principle can be used to separate cases like this from people who just don’t want to fight.

Don’t get me wrong I am sympathetic to someone forced to fight in a war that seems to have at least an even chance of making things worse and ending up killing lots of people for little benefit (hardly matters if Saddam or civil war kills people). In fact it even might be a good thing if Canada gave him asylum though the US must punish him if we catch him to deter this sort of behavior. However, the way the BBC doesn’t point out the glaring obvious problems with the stupid little emotional platitudes people use to justify themselves really annoys me.