Smoke rises over Iran’s capital, Tehran, after the United States and Israel launched a large-scale military operation on February 28. Photo taken on March 1 (©Getty/Kyodo).
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In his April 9 column, former Ambassador to Australia Shingo Yamagami discussed the US–Israeli strikes on Iran. He asked whether Japan should tolerate a hardline Islamist regime "buying time while advancing its nuclear and missile programs, supporting terrorism and intimidation, and threatening free passage through the Strait of Hormuz, a route vital to the Japanese economy."
Former US Ambassador Shinsuke Sugiyama made a similar point in the April 2 issue of Shukan Shincho, noting that "Iran had refused IAEA inspections and continued developing nuclear missiles." In 2006, this led the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution imposing economic sanctions.
Sugiyama went on to question whether any use of force against such a "rule-breaking country" is absolutely prohibited under international law, saying, "I believe this is a matter that should be debated."
War to Stop War
The UN Charter—the foundation of today's international legal order—was born out of the devastation wrought by World War II. To pass judgment on the war's crimes, the Allied powers convened two tribunals.
At the Nuremberg trial, the Nazi extermination of the Jews was prosecuted as a crime against humanity. At the Tokyo trial, Japan was tried not for crimes against humanity, but chiefly for crimes against peace. In both cases, the Allies applied these new offenses retroactively, ex post facto.
The concept of crimes against peace was carried into the UN Charter, which made war, or the use of force to settle international disputes, illegal under international law. The principles of sovereignty and noninterference in domestic affairs belong to the same framework.
But international law never fully addressed another important reality of the war: that Nazi barbarism was ultimately stopped by war itself. How, then, did the postwar order treat the use of force to halt crimes against humanity?
Powerless Before Atrocity
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Chinese Communist Party caused the deaths of tens of millions of its own people, yet the international community could do little.
In the 1970s, when Pol Pot's regime massacred one to two million Cambodians, it was Vietnam's military invasion that ended the killing spree. Kim Jong Il's North Korea starved as many as three million of its people while continuing its nuclear program in the late 1990s, but the world was powerless.
In Kosovo in 1998-99, NATO carried out airstrikes to cease ethnic cleansing and a humanitarian crisis targeting ethnic Albanians by Serbian security forces. The action had no UN Security Council authorization because China and Russia opposed it.
Then, in 2001, after Al-Qaeda carried out the September 11 attacks, Washington declared a war on terror. It used military force, not merely police action, against a non-state terrorist organization. US special forces later killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. He was not arrested or brought before a court.
In his famous "axis of evil" speech in January 2002, then President George W. Bush said the war on terror had two goals. The first was to bring terrorists to justice. The second was to prevent state sponsors of terrorism, namely North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, threatening the US and its allies, and handing those weapons to terrorists.
The Bush-Era Precedent
In plain terms, Bush said Washington would use war, if necessary, to stop those three countries from obtaining nuclear, chemical, or other such weapons. At the time, most of the international community, including Japan, aligned itself with America's war on terror.
For the US, the nightmare scenario was that a terrorist group could obtain nuclear or chemical weapons and use them in a suicide attack on major American cities. Washington was determined to prevent that at all costs.
North Korea, meanwhile, was secretly acquiring uranium-enrichment technology from Pakistan. Kim Jong Il must have understood that he, too, could become a target of regime change. That intense military pressure helped drive his decision to acknowledge the abductions of Japanese citizens at his 2002 summit with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and the subsequent return of five victims to Japan.
Israel today finds itself in a similar position to the US after the September 11 attacks. In October 2023, Hamas, an Iran-backed terrorist group, killed some 1,200 people in a surprise attack on Israel and took roughly 250 hostages.
If Iran, and especially the Revolutionary Guard, which supports various terrorist organizations, acquires nuclear weapons, it would only be a matter of time before they fell into terrorist hands. That is why Israel's sense of danger is acute.
After September 11, the US chose force to prevent catastrophic weapons from falling into the wrong hands. The Trump administration's strikes on Iran are best understood as an extension of the Bush administration's war on terror.
RELATED:
- 47 Years of Humiliation: The Grievance Driving America's Iran Policy
- Iran, Trump, and the Strategic Challenge Facing East Asia
Author: Tsutomu Nishioka
(Read this article in Japanese)
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