Invading Iran's Consulate: Why Should We Care?

"What right does the Iranian government have to claim the benefits of any sort of international law?" someone asked rhetorically on a Newsweek blog, recounting a litany of Iranian transgressions as a response to criticism of our summary invasion of an Iranian consulate in Kurdish territory and kidnapping of five people inside without any warning to either Iran or the Kurds. What right does Iran have to the benefits of international law? The same right any country does. Since when should we base our own behavior on what another country has done? We're supposed to be better than that. Americans are supposed to respect the rule of law regardless of what others do. Any country that goes in and just grabs people out of a diplomatic entity, which, by the way, is considered the sovereign territory of the country whose consulate it is, invites the same treatment of our own people worldwide. And the Kurds have been our allies. How would we like it if another country invaded a foreign consulate in Washington, DC, and just grabbed people out of it without even notifying our government beforehand or attempting any sort of diplomatic solution? This kind of thinking is a slippery slope and those who advocate it have given our country a black eye.

Meanwhile, I hope that invading Iranian territory in Kurdish land is not a precursor to attacking Iran itself, in a last-ditch tragic effort to turn around the Bush administration's abysmal legacy. Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the committee hearing on January 11 that if the administration does invade Iran with no congressional consultation, it will provoke a constitutional confrontation. In response to Ms. Rice's mealy-mouthed response to an inquiry from Sen. Biden on this point, he clarified that, in his view, President Bush has *no* right to unilaterally invade Iran. He subsequently sent a letter to the President reiterating that view. I hope Bush is not secretly hoping to continue proceeding with the neocons' dream-world scenario by trying to knock over the rest of the Middle East. His spokespeople say he isn't but they have lost all credibility, so it falls to people like Sen. Biden to keep us from even worse folly than we've already suffered.
Tags: Iran, Biden, neocons