By Tom Gallagher

IT WILL NOT shock the reader to learn that most of what's in Michael Mandel's How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity doesn't resemble anything you heard in the presidential debates. In fact, after reading this compelling case that "America's war on Iraq in 2003 was its third illegal war in just under four years ... in technical terms ... a 'war of aggression' " that constitutes "the supreme international crime," John Kerry's complaints that George W. Bush shouldn't have started the war in the first place and that he didn't send enough troops when he did will probably just sound more like that joke about the restaurant where "the food's no good, and besides the portions are too small" than they already do. And as for the other guy, he wouldn't even be interested in the issue.

But you should also know that if the book's title doesn't stop you at the cover, you need only reach the second paragraph to realize it's not going to be a painful experience. That's where Mandel, a Canadian law professor at Toronto's York University, credits the comic strip Doonesbury for characterizing pre-war British and American government efforts to discredit United Nations arms inspectors in Iraq as "risk assessment enhancement."

Obviously it's not that Mandel's book isn't serious – its title is to be taken quite literally – but, understanding that you can learn a lot more about American politics from reading the comics than by watching TV news, for instance, he writes not just for legal scholars but also for anyone concerned with how America should conduct itself in the world.

He states simply that it's "the Charter of the United Nations (to which, all appearances to the contrary, the United States is still a party) that made the Iraq war unquestionably illegal," as it does every war that isn't an exertion of "the right of self defense and has not been authorized by the Security Council as absolutely necessary in the collective interest of international peace and security." But recognizing that you'll run into a lot of people in this country who couldn't give a rat's posterior for what any United Nations Charter might say, and that a fair number of them are in Congress, his point is not just that America's recent wars have been illegal but also that it's right that they should be.

The so-called Bush Doctrine – announced as "The National Security Strategy of the United States" two years ago and justifying not only preemptive attacks to thwart planned enemy attacks for which there's evidence, but also preventive attacks against other nations that might attack in the future, or even facilitate an attack by a third party, as in the fabricated connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda – is, Mandel says, "a disguise for the doctrine of Might Makes Right so thin that a child could see through it." To some, poking holes in the arguments for the Iraq war may now seem like shooting fish in a barrel, but his review of the government's rush to war in Afghanistan and its lack of interest in pursuing a peaceful extradition of Osama bin Laden could refresh a lot of memories.

Some of those memories we'd just as soon forget – like the post-9/11 CBS-New York Times poll reporting that 58 percent of Americans supported "military action against whoever is responsible for the attacks ... even if it means many thousands of innocent civilians may be killed." America's "other war" in Afghanistan may not have produced bin Laden, but it has produced the civilian deaths.

It's the 1999 Kosovo war, however, and the subsequent International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia, that forms the core of the book. Although precluded from ruling on the war's justification, the ICTY is the first international body specifically charged with judging the legality of a war's conduct since the years immediately following World War II. Unfortunately, while it has at least strived for a measure of evenhandedness in its pursuit of charges against Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, the ICTY has never seriously considered the legality and morality of NATO's Kosovo bombing campaign.

Amnesty International charged NATO with a war crime for its intentional bombing of a Belgrade TV station that killed 16 civilians. Although subsequently acknowledging that the attack would indeed have constituted a war crime if it had been aimed at Yugoslavia's "propaganda" apparatus, as opposed to its military, the tribunal decided that this wasn't the case.

In a similar spirit of generosity, in granting the possibility that "the targeting by NATO of Serbian petrochemical industries may well have served a clear and important military purpose," the ICTY found justification not only for not convicting or even charging NATO with waging illegal war against a civilian population but also justification for not even undertaking an investigation. In fact, Mandel reports, for a considerable period of time a hyperlink actually connected the ICTY and NATO Web sites. So if you wanted to know, for instance, why the tribunal filed charges against Yugoslavia's use of anticivilian cluster bombs but not against NATO's, the answer was only a mouse click away in the NATO press releases that constituted the extent of the tribunal's research. Make no mistake though: Mandel's objection "isn't about whether Milosevic is responsible" for the killing of civilians; "it's about whether NATO was also responsible."

Mandel pessimistically writes that "when the history of the overthrow of the United Nations is written, a lot of credit will have to be given to the ICTY for its role in Kosovo because Kosovo gave unilateralism an enormous boost. It allowed the United States, through NATO, to break free of the limits of international law by fashioning a higher legality." As a Jew of Eastern European origins, he's particularly troubled by the equation of "ethnic cleansing" with genocide, as well as the claim that an earlier acceptance of the principle of "humanitarian intervention" might have allowed the Allies to prevent the Holocaust. He points out that 97 percent of the Jews the Nazis killed lived outside Germany. In other words, the Allies were already at war with Germany when the Holocaust occurred.

This book's only potential downside is that while Mandel is a tireless campaigner (he led an effort to persuade the ICTY to charge NATO leaders with war crimes), his devastating case that "the globalization ('universalization') of human rights is just a euphemism for the strong calling the shots" might make some readers feel that there's little or nothing they can do.

Here we might again turn to another of the comic strips that frequently have it all over the editorial pages: Boondocks, where one of the kids recently noted, "How fortunate are we, to live in a place where leaders engage in full and open debate about the critical issues of war and peace ... [silent panel] ... a year and a half too late, but who's counting?" Too late and too little, certainly. But better than nothing. And it won't get better if those who know better do nothing.

Tom Gallagher is a writer who lives in San Francisco and is a frequent contributor to Lit.

How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage, and Crimes Against Humanity
By Michael Mandel. Pluto Press, 320 pages, $22.95 (paper).