“No More War” focuses on the one nation in recent times that has been continuously engaged in wars of aggression. In fact, that nation has been engaged in wars or military occupations in all but five years since its founding in 1776. Author and professor of human rights law at the University of Pittsburgh, Dan Kovalik, contrasts international law designed to keep the peace to the contravening ideology of “humanitarian intervention” used to excuse the US imperial project.
Besides being a compelling exposition on US imperial adventures and its epigones, No More War is also a primer for law students and the general public on international law. The two most seminal documents of international law, the Charter of the United Nations and the Statute of the International Court of Justice, are included as appendices. […]
Kovalik explains that the UN Charter and associated human rights covenants are intended to provide the legal basis to end wars of aggression. In the words of the Nuremberg Justices:
To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
The UN Charter only allows states to use of force for self-defense, and then it must be pursuant to a UN Security Council resolution and with the consent of the host state. Citing numerous examples – Nicaragua, Vietnam, Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc. – Kovalik shows that “nearly every war the US fights is a war of choice, meaning that the US fights because it wants to, not because it must do so in order to defend the homeland.” […]
The billionaire-funded so-called human rights groups are also exposed for their ideological service to the US imperial project. Amnesty International has the distinction of being the only major human rights organization failing to condemn apartheid in South Africa or to protest the US designation of Nelson Mandela as a terrorist.
Likewise, Human Rights Watch and especially its director Kenneth Roth are criticized for promotion of the “responsibility to protect” pretext for US aggression. According to Kovalik, Roth believes “the US, by definition, simply does not commit mass war crimes or genocide. It is only people of the undeveloped world who do such things.” Ajamu Baraka with the Black Alliance for Peace observes, “The ‘responsibility to protect’ is a white supremacist construction – the 21st-century ‘white man’s burden.’ Läs presentationen