Can you get there from here?

I posted the following on R.J. Rummel's Democratic Peace website today. To be honest I'm still thinking this through, in large part becasue I don't like the answers I keep coming up with.

[I want to] talk about two things at once--the general "freedomist" principles, and the War in Iraq--and how one can support the first without necessarily supporting the other.

I think Kenneth got the gist of what I meant by the "liberation from above" remark. I'm trying to draw the distinction between *formal* rights and institutions and the practice of everyday life. It's important to remove impediments, and outsiders can contribute a lot to that. But removing the chains from a slave doesn't necessarily make him free--if he has adopted the mindset of a slave. Education helps, institutions help, law helps. We can encourage people to be free, but people have to want to be free, and to believe freedom is a real possibilty for themselves, and to be willing to tolerate the freedom of others.

As for Iraq, I opposed the war not because I thought Iraq wasn't deserving, but because in a world with finite American resources the U.S. has to pick its battles, and I concluded that this particular battle was too costly in terms of the probable results. It was a judgement call, and I understand how others could disagree.

I hope I was wrong.

The Iraq case also raises another point, which is that whatever the practical arguments for and against an American invasion of Iraq, it was (without a Security Council resolution) clearly a violation of international law.

Now, that might not bother some people. I think most of us would agree that international law is wrong to place national sovereignty over the rights and lives of individuals. Before WWII individuals had the relation to the state under international law that is similar to the relationship between a pet and its owner, and the law (made by states for purposes of state) has been very slow to improve. Any new, better set of rules will require a degree of consensus (or hegemony) that doesn't exist.

Some kind of international law is required, if there are to be relationships across borders. The current system of international law is far from what I (and I think most of us) think it should be. Improving the present system is at best a long-term project. (A global cataclysm or war would probably speed things up, but at a terrible cost, and not necessarily for the better.) So what do we do now?