International Law is the Number One Casualty of the US & Israel’s Illegal War on Iran

Interview with Craig Mokhiber, international human rights lawyer and director of the NYC Office of UN High Commission for Human Rights, conducted by Scott Harris

iran war

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran was launched on Feb. 28, just one day after Oman’s foreign minister announced a major breakthrough in indirect U.S.-Iran nuclear negotiations, where he said agreements were reached on halting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear material stockpiling as well as resuming IAEA inspections.

In 11 days of war, Israeli and American airstrikes killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and dozens of the nation’s political and military leaders. Overall, the Red Crescent reports that Iran has suffered more than 1,200 deaths, including 175 schoolgirls and staff who died when a U.S. missile reportedly struck a school in the city of Minab on the first day of the war.  Israeli attacks on Lebanon have killed over 500 people, mostly civilians. Iranian retaliatory missile and drone attacks have killed a dozen Israelis and caused 12 to 14 deaths in Gulf states.

At least 7 U.S. service members have been killed and 140 injured in the conflict, as Iran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent world oil prices skyrocketing. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York Office of the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights until he resigned in protest over UN inaction on the Gaza genocide. Here he discusses the catastrophic regional war launched against Iran by Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the further destruction of international law.

CRAIG MOKHIBER: I think alongside the attacks that the U.S.-Israel Axis, as I’ve called it, have been waging on Palestinians, on Lebanese, now on Iranians is a full frontal assault on international law. International institutions, the international order that has been painstakingly built up since the second World War. This is not a gray area case. This is not a difficult case. This is blatantly illegal.
There are a few rules of international law that are preeminent rules. One of them is the prohibition of aggression. Aggression was called at Nuremberg, the crime of crimes. It’s been called the Supreme International Crime. And this is classic aggression. There is no justification for the U.S. and Israel attack on Iran in law because Iran had not waged an armed attack against either the United States or Israel in this case. And so this is strictly an act of aggression. And what that means in international law is that every military action by the U.S. and Israel against Iran is unlawful and needs to be subject to accountability.

And it also means that Iran, under international law, has the right to use armed force against Israel and the United States and their forces to repel the armed attack, the unlawful armed attack that they are launching against Iran. And if you watch corporate media or read corporate media in the United States, you wouldn’t get a hint of this. There’s no mention of the legality of the action that the United States and Israel are undertaking. In fact, it’s just thick with war propaganda that makes the propaganda and the leadup to the Iraq war seem mild by comparison.

SCOTT HARRIS: Craig, we’ve heard a lot of justifications for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It shifted from the alleged nuclear threat, ballistic missiles, regime change, protecting the human rights of the Iranian people. What’s your view of the real reason Israel and the U.S. launched this war?

CRAIG MOKHIBER: Well, it’s clear that the justifications they’ve offered are just false on their face. And it’s another problem with the way this war is being sold to the American people—the distortions are really incredible. And we start with this nuclear hypocrisy of the U.S. and the Israeli regime.
And what you don’t hear in the news around here is that Iran has long renounced the quest for nuclear weapons. It’s codified the prohibition of nuclear weapons in its own national laws and directives. It’s ratified the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. It’s opened itself to intrusive international inspections over many, many years. It even entered into a formal agreement with the United States and others that would prevent them from developing nuclear weapons. That was the JCPOA so-called, which was abandoned not by Iran, but by Donald Trump at the assistance insistence of his Israel donors. But of course, the real reason that Iran has been attacked by Israel and the U.S. is not because it has a nuclear weapon, but because it does not have nuclear weapons.

And that has led the U.S. and Israel to believe that they can easily defeat Iran despite its significant size and military capabilities. But the hypocrisy of this claim is all the more stunning. First, it’s clearly false. And there’s no suggestion that Iran has a nuclear weapon or was developing a nuclear weapon.

The only party in the region that does have nuclear weapons—entirely undeclared and unsupervised nuclear weapons—is Israel. And Israel was joined in attacking Iran by another nuclear power, the United States, which under Donald Trump has withdrawn from the INF Treaty, has rejected extension of the New START Treaty, and as I said before, withdrew from the JCPOA. So in other words, two rogue nuclear powers have tried to justify their attacks on a third state that has no nuclear weapons by invoking nuclear control and non-proliferation.

And then what I’ve written about this is the other distinction here is that you’ve got two countries that hold the world record for aggression, which is to say the United States and Israel, claiming that somehow Iran was the threat.

Iran, a country that has literally not initiated a war with any other country in centuries, and the U.S. and the Israeli regime together responsible for most of the aggression in the world with attacks. You mentioned Donald Trump. Donald Trump has the distinction now of being the president in U.S. history who has attacked the most countries. No other president in U.S. history has attacked as many countries as Donald Trump, who has attacked 10 countries, just 7 in his second term alone.

And between them, they have attacked Palestine and Lebanon and Syria and Iraq and Yemen and Somalia and Nigeria, Libya, Pakistan, Venezuela, of course, Qatar, Iran. Besides attacking boats in the Caribbean and humanitarian ships and the Mediterranean, there’s no other country that even comes close to the threat that is represented by these two countries and yet with the help of a very complicit corporate media in this country, they’ve tried to basically turn reality on its head to justify their war.

And then of course, when the nuclear justification fell apart, they tried to raise human rights concerns. And this, as somebody who has spent more than 40 years in the international human rights movement, I find this deeply offensive, right? And this should be very familiar. They did this with regard to Iraq when there were no weapons of mass destruction. They tried to shift their arguments to human rights justifications. It’s absurd to hear them now making these same claims here.

For more information, visit Craig Mokhiber’s website at craigmokhiber.org.

Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Craig Mokhiber (23:03) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.

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