The director of the Iowa Center for Human Rights says the war was wrong, even if we won. Burns Weston, winner of the Faculty Excellence Award from Iowa’s Board of Regents, speaks in Des Moines tonight, sponsored by the Drake National Lawyers Guild. Weston, a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, says the war we just fought violated international law. Weston says “probably the most fundamental treaty in the world today” is the United Nations Charter, and the US action fails to live up to the legal standards the charter imposes upon the behavior of nations. He says the United States hasn’t met the requirements in the charter to prove it acted in self-defense, nor the requirements of getting authorization from the Security Council for what it did. Weston says now the brief war is over, the United States will have a hard time pointing to improvements in peace in the region from its intervention. Weston says The possibilities for “profound and widespread instability” have opened up in the Middle East. Weston is a well-known scholar of international law and he says the U-S hasn’t done a very good job so far setting up the new administration of Iraq. Weston says the way the U-S military failed, so, far, to prevent museums and hospitals from being ransacked suggests the U-S doesn’t have its “act together.” Weston says this bodes ill for the future as we’re already seeing Iraqis who only a week earlier were cheering the so-called “liberators” now arguing against us. Professor Weston will speak at Drake University’s Olmsted Center tonight at 7:30.
