I've become a regular listerner to Hugh Hewitt's radio show over the net. Yesterday he got into a real argument with Erwin Chemerinsky, a law professor at USC, over a column Chemerinsky had in the L. A. Times on Tuesday (registration required), claiming that our complaints about Saddam's violation of the Geneva Convention it the treatment of our POWs was hypocritical or invalid because the U.S. has violated international law in our treatment of the internees at Guantanamo and because this war is illegal. Hugh reamed him on the grounds that he was furnishing arguments and excuses to the Iraqi regime.

Personally, I think that "international law" is only valid as long as governments consent to and obey it. It certainly didn't stop France, Germany and Russia from trading with Saddam in violation of U.N. sanctions, and then hamstring the U.N. Security Council when it turned out that we were serious about Resolution 1441.

I think that a lot of academics and liberals are in love with the idea of International Law and the U.N. as its embodiment partly because it is inhabited by smart people like themselves who don't have to be elected by anything so plebian as populations. Nearly everybody who works for the U.N. are the the New York Times sort of people, who resent the very idea that someone like George Bush could be elected President of the United States.

The problem is that laws passed by organizations without the power to enforce them are about as effective as the U.N. has been at dealing with Saddam. So, to cavil about the "legality" of this war shows a certain impracticality that one associates with the ivory tower of academia.

A lot of very bright people are adept at memorizing legal theories and cases, but have no sense of what works in the real world. International law doesn't. To argue that our treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo in any way shape or form legitimizes the atrocities committed against Americans taken captive by Iraqis, is casuistry that only a law professor whose life has been spent working for Appellate Court judges could do with a straight face.

James Carroll, Paul Krugman, Josh Marshall--they all have education, but not wisdom. How else could they have written such utter drivel? Marshall takes Michael Ledeen to task for calling the mistreatment of our POWs "terrorism," as though semantics should trump reality. Having made such laughable arguments, they should slink away in shame and try to rebuild their careers under assumed names, but as long as they work for editors and administrators who think the same way, there's no need for them to worry.