Rahul Mahajan Makes the Argument that UN Resolution or Not, This War Violates International Law.

... without a Security Council resolution, the war is clearly a violation of international law, as U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has recently pointed out. It is, however, possible for a war fought with U.N. approval still to be a violation of international law.

Iraq is threatening no country with aggression and its violations of Security Council resolutions, while clear, are technical, mostly a matter of providing incomplete documentation about weapons that may or may not exist, and for the use of which there are no apparent plans.

First, in August, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld ordered that the list of bombing targets be extended far beyond any goal of enforcing the no-fly zones to include command-and-control centers and in general to go beyond simple reaction to threats. According to John Pike of Globalsecurity.org, this was "part of their strategy of going ahead and softening up the air defenses now" to prepare for war later. By December 2002, the shift could be noted in a 300% increase in ordnance dropped per threat detected -- a clear sign that simply defending the overflights was no longer the primary aim of the bombings. According to the Guardian, "Whitehall officials have admitted privately that the 'no-fly' patrols, conducted by RAF and US aircraft from bases in Kuwait, are designed to weaken Iraq's air defence systems and have nothing to do with their stated original purpose."

They have also admitted attacked missile launch sites and some sites that only loosely fall into command control and communication, not defensive actions to protect the illegal overflights.

Weakening air defense and command-and-control are the standard first steps in all U.S. wars since 1991, so the first salvoes in the war were being fired even as inspections continued. In the first two months of this year, bombings occurred almost every other day.

Even worse, according to strategic analyst Michael Klare, by February 2002 it had become clear that all of the administration's supposed diplomatic activities in the Fall of 2002 and early 2003 had merely been a smokescreen.

The decision was made in late August, but the [plan], required at least a six-month deployment. Ever since then, the timetable has not been one of diplomacy, U.N. resolutions, and weapons inspections, but rather one of deployment, strong-arming of regional allies needed as staging areas for the invasion, and, quite likely, replenishment of stocks of precision weapons depleted in the war on Afghanistan.

It surely is unprecedented in world history that a country is under escalating attack; told repeatedly that it will be subjected to a full-scale war; required to disarm itself before that war; and then castigated by the "international community" for significant but partial compliance.