I have been troubled by the transparency of the administration and its apologists falling back increasingly on the ‘humanitarian’ justifications for the invasion of Iraq as the justification of averting an imminent threat has evaporated. Here, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch, which has the credibility of having documented and remonstrated about Saddam Hussein’s abuses for decades, writes in the Human Rights Watch World Report 2004 that the humanitarian argument does not bear up under examination. The human rights emergency in Iraq was no more dire than in many other parts of the world where we do not choose to intervenq; “the Iraq war was not mainly about saving the Iraqi people from mass slaughter, and …no such slaughter was then ongoing or imminent”. Why have standards? A lesser emergency is still an emergency, right? Roth points out that the capacity for military intervention is finite, and if it is used in lesser emergencies (even in cases, unlike Iraq, where the moral urgency is unambiguous) the capacity to face greater atrocities may be lacking. Undermining the international legal order by violating another soverign country’s borders, especially without the support fo the world community, further impairs international protection of human rights. In short, the intervention fails Human Rights Watch’s standards for a humanitarian response — it was not a last resort, was not intended or structured to be for the benefit of the Iraqi people, departed in multiple respects from interventions acknowledged by the world community as legitimately humanitarian, had no endorsement by multilateral aothorities, and was not structured effectively to prevent doing more harm than good. I share Roth’s concern that there be an international multilateral consensus on criteria (hopefully, similar to those he outlines in this manifesto) for humanitarian interventions, preferably with the force of treaty law. It is unlikey the U.S. under its present administration would be a party to such an accord, given our repeated insistence that we will brook no interference in our right to defend ourselves and the unreasoned fluidity among the various pretexts offered for our unilateral adventurism abroad. But it would make the US’s renegade status more unambiguous and serve as a legitimate basis for international penalties for our arrogance and defiance.