Noam Chomsky - Turning the Tide U.S. intervention in

Patterns of Intervention
Classics in Politics: Turning the Tide Noam Chomsky
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about being attacked” to the UN and OAS, “yet, he said, neither El
Salvador nor the United States has moved in the OAS or the U.N. to
formally charge Nicaragua with aggression”; the US has not even
notified the Security Council of warlike measures such as the mining of
Nicaraguan waters, which it claimed fell under “self-defense” when the
facts were exposed, in explicit violation of the Supreme Law of the Land,
which requires that measures taken in the exercise of the right of selfdefense
shall be “immediately reported to the Security Council” (UN
Charter, Article 51). 10 Nor is the US willing to permit the World Court to
hear its claims in the case brought against it, since in this forum too the
US charge of armed attack would simply elicit ridicule.
The Rule of Law, however, does not apply to the US and its clients,
or the USSR, or other violent powers that observe only the Rule of
Force. 11
The US refusal to accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of
Justice in the matter of the Nicaraguan charges, unanimously rejected
by the Court apart from the US representative, aroused much criticism.
The American Society of International Law denounced it
“overwhelmingly” in the first such action in its 78-year history. Their
position is understandable. When the US government accepted the
compulsory jurisdiction of the Court in 1946, the Senate observed that
the force of that commitment “is that of a treaty” and entailed “a
renunciation of any intention to withdraw our obligation in the face of a
threatened legal action.” A six-month notice was required “to terminate
this declaration,” a commitment plainly violated when the Reagan
Administration, three days before Nicaragua’s complaint was filed,
attempted to modify the 1946 declaration so as to exclude “disputes
with any Central American states or arising out of or relating to events in
Central America.” 12
The Reagan Administration was also sharply criticized by Senator