The New World Order

By Tony Judt

At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention

by David Rieff

Simon and Schuster, 270 pp., $24.00

The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War

by Andrew J. Bacevich

Oxford University Press, 270 pp., $28.00

A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility

Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change

United Nations, 2004, 129 pp. (available at www.un.org/secureworld)

Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power

by Amnesty International

Report on the United States
May 2005, 164 pp. (available at www.amnesty.org)

1.

Those of us who opposed America's invasion of Iraq from the outset can take no comfort from its catastrophic consequences. On the contrary: we should now be asking ourselves some decidedly uncomfortable questions. The first concerns the propriety of "preventive" military intervention. If the Iraq war is wrong—"the wrong war at the wrong time"^[1] —why, then, was the 1999 US-led war on Serbia right? That war, after all, also lacked the imprimatur of UN Security Council approval. It too was an unauthorized and uninvited attack on a sovereign state—undertaken on "preventive" grounds—that caused many civilian casualties and aroused bitter resentment against the Americans who carried it out.