Bomb Squad Sent to Rush Limbaugh's House

None of this is legal justification. The "Iraq Liberation Act" basically authorized supporting internal opposition groups in Iraq, not a foreign military invasion. The UN resolutions, and to what extent Iraq complied with them is a matter for the UNSC to enforce or not enforce as and in the manner the UNSC decides, not as a couple individual member states to decide on their own. This "legal justification" amounts to saying some states should violate the UN charter to "enforce" UNSC resolutions in a manner which those particular states like, but which doesn't agree with what the UNSC thinks should be done. Moreover, you're overlooking the UN Charter altogether, which was also ratified by the US, and everything it says about these matters:
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40299.html

None of the things you're citing are ever justifications for war under the Charter.

And the no-fly zones were themselves rather contentious and of dubious legality at best, as they were never authorized by any UN body and many legal experts considered it aggression (as Iraq did). As to Iraq occasionally firing on those planes, Iraq saw those planes as aggressive foreign aircraft that had invaded Iraqi air space and often bombed it. The idea that a legal justification for starting a war is that the country in question had fired on foreign planes invading its airspace with no authorization to be there, is pretty weak to say the least.

"past history of mass murder" is no justification for starting a war. Such a justification is flatly groundless and illegal under the UN Charter, and is groundless from any humanitarian perspective, as HRW argues. And "the deaths before and during OFF", if you actually believe there were a large number of such deaths (I'm skeptical) were not killings, but were from deprivation brought on by the US/UK-imposed sanctions. This again has no legal or humanitarian justification for starting a war.

Here is where I think we start to get down to some reality. The actual imminent threat was that at some point the UN would have had to rule that Iraq had complied with all the resolutions (which we now know it really already had done anyway, since it had no WMDs anymore), and the US would lose the ability to control Iraq's airspace and its economy. And then Iraq would re-join normal international relations and wind up giving preference for oil deals and such to Russia, France, China, etc. and shun the US and UK that had been smashing it for years. The real threat was that peace would break out, and the likely trajectory of that peace would not serve the strategic interests of the US in the region. So the solution was to start a war of aggression. That's pretty much the heart of the matter. All the rest is smoke and mirrors.

 

That again is not a legal justification. It is itself groundless weaseling. There was a war in 1990-91, to push Iraq out of Kuwait because they had invaded a foreign nation in violation of the UN Charter, and the UNSC approved military action. That military action then achieved its goal and the UNSC declared a formal ceasefire to all hostilities by all parties to that war. The UNSC then passed resolutions requiring Iraq to meet various conditions. Iraq then was subject to a vast series of weapons inspections most of which it complied with. In some cases it did not. In some cases the US and UK also violated those resolutions such as by turning inspections into a spying operation, and constantly moving the goal posts in terms of what kind of places or documents needed to be inspected, all of which also played some role in the problems. In those cases the UNSC that had declared the formal cease fire and imposed the resolutions is the sole authority to decide what to do about violations of its own resolutions, or those imagined violations, not some other state or even 'coalition' of states that's cobbled together to do something other than what the UNSC has decided (which all the way to the end was to call for further inspections, not war). That's called taking the law into your own hands and you've lost any claim whatsoever to legal justification.

And just think of what your argument implies. It would mean, for example, that the first time the UNSC decided that Iraq had not fully complied with some aspect of the resolutions (which I think they did very shortly after the first war), then any state on its own, such as Russia, could then have just sent in its armies to take over Iraq, put in place a government it wanted and they would have had "legal justification". Nonsense. Pravda might have made this argument. To anyone else it would have been a joke.

The US abandoned its obligations to uphold the UN Charter in 2003, and you applaud that. So it seems you do have a problem with it when complying with our obligations doesn't suit you.

This is kind of like setting a place on fire and then saying the destruction is all the Fire Department's fault because they weren't doing all they should have to put out your fire. Regardless, as I said before, if you really think a lot of people were dying from sanctions in the 1990's, you'd have to conclude that OFF was quite a success from a humanitarian perspective. It's clear that there were not lots of people dying from sanctions by 2003, so OFF must have done pretty well to turn things around.

The problems are that "effecting regime change" was never, ever, any part of either the UN mandate for the first Gulf War or of the resulting UN resolutions which are supposedly the unequivocal "legal justification" for the invasion. If the proposal is to "effect regime change" by war that is just a prima facie violation of the UN Charter, in which a desire for "regime change" is never a legitimate basis for war. It is just aggressive war, which is a crime under the Charter.

The idea of "regime change" as a goal of supporting opposition groups (as in the "Iraq Liberation Act") is something quite different though, and not inherently any crime according to the Charter. The US had such a policy (implicitly or explicitly) with the USSR for decades, but it never actually came to war or invasion of the USSR. And whatever the Democrats believed before the Iraq war, we know rather well now that whatever the doubts or bluster on all sides, Iraq actually had already complied with the resolutions. They had no WMD anymore, and they were continuing to allow inspections right up until the invasion. There was just a tiny percentage of past WMD which they couldn't account for in any formal way, and which was used as a pretext to keep moving the goal posts and applying more and more pressure, and ultimately starting a war to prevent the looming threat of Iraq being judged in compliance with the resolutions at some point.