Former U.S. President George W. Bush articulated the goals of the "war on terror" in a September 20, 2001 speech, in which he said it "will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." In that same speech, he called the war "a task that does not end", and was used by President Bush in his 2006 State of The Union address. The justification given for the invasion of Iraq (prior to its happening) was to prevent terrorist or other attacks by Iraq on the United States or other nations. This can be viewed as a conventional warfare realization of the war on terror. A major criticism leveled at this justification is that, according to war opponents, it does not fulfill one of the requirements of a just war and that in waging a war preventively, the United States has undermined international law and the authority of the United Nations, particularly the United Nations Security Council. On this ground it has been advocated that by invading a country that does not pose an imminent threat and without UN support, the U.S. has violated international law, including the UN Charter and the Nuremberg principles and is guilty of committing a war of aggression, which is considered to be a war crime. Additional criticism has been raised that the United States has set a precedent, under the premise of which any nation could justify the invasion of other states. Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that on the eve of U.S. intervention in 2003, Iraq represented, at best, a gathering threat and not an imminent one.[12] In hindsight he notes that Iraq did not even represent a gathering threat. "The decision to attack Iraq in March 2003 was discretionary; it was a war of choice. There was no vital American interests in imminent danger, and there were alternatives to using military force, such as strengthening existing sanctions."[13] By contrast, Haass argues that U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 began as a war of necessity—vital interests were at stake—but morphed "into something else, and it crossed a line in March 2009, when President Barack Obama` decided to sharply increase American troop levels and declared that it was U.S. policy to 'take the fight to the Taliban in the south and east' of the country."[13] Afghanistan, according to Haass, eventually became a war of choice. The "War on terror" has been seen as a pretext for reducing civil liberties. Within the United States, critics argue that the Bush Administration and lower governments have restricted civil liberties and created a "culture of fear". Bush introduced the USA PATRIOT Act legislation to the United States Congress shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which significantly expanded U.S. law enforcement's power.[citation needed] It has been criticized as being too broad and having been abused for purposes unrelated to counter-terrorism. President Bush had also proposed Total Information Awareness, a federal program to collect and process massive amounts of data to identify behaviors consistent with terrorist threats. It was heavily criticized as being an "Orwellian" case of mass surveillance. In the United Kingdom, critics have claimed that the Blair government has used the War on Terror as a pretext to radically curtail civil liberties, some enshrined in law since Magna Carta. For example, the detention-without-trial in Belmarsh prison; controls on free speech through laws against protests near Parliament and laws banning the "glorification" of terrorism; and reductions in checks on police power, as in the case of Jean Charles de Menezes and Mohammed Abdul Kahar. Former Liberal Democrat Leader Sir Menzies Campbell has also condemned Blair's inaction over the controversial U.S. practice of extraordinary rendition, arguing that the human rights conventions to which the UK is a signatory (e.g. European Convention on Human Rights) impose on the government a "legal obligation" to investigate and prevent potential torture and human rights violations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_War_on_Terror

• published: 05 Mar 2014
• views: 9