Weapons of Mass Destruction and Terrorism

“Political terrorism is the deliberate use or threat of violence against noncombatants, calculated to instill fear, alarm, and ultimately a feeling of helplessness in an audience beyond the immediate victims . . . A mixture of drama and dread, political terrorism is not senseless violence; it is a premeditated strategy of extortion that presents people with a danger that seems ubiquitous, unavoidable, and unpredictable”(Kegley et al., 188, 2012). According to, Humanitarian Intervention Against States Supporting Terrorism,“The fact that international terrorism is threatening international peace and security had long been realized and accepted by the UN Security Council” (Adany, 2003). Terrorism contains agitational elements, coercive objectives, and organizational objectives (Kegley et al., 189, 2012). “In fact, terrorism has been so successful that between 1980 and 2003, half of all suicide terrorist campaigns were closely followed by substantial concessions by the target governments (Mingst et al., [Kydd & Walter] 392, 2011).

In 2007, German-Iranian trader Mohsen Vanaki procured sensitive physical material for the country of Iran which was thought to be utilized for the construction of weapons of mass destruction. Vanaki was tried in a German court, “Oberlandesgericht of Frankfurt am Main (a Hessian state court)”(Albright & Walrond, 1-2, 2009). Vanaki originally was able to secure his defense in this court setting as the intelligence community based his implication upon whether Iran at the time was in fact building weapons of mass destruction. Although Vanaki finally lost upon appeal (Albright et al., 2, 2009), questioned is whether the jurisdiction of this Hessian court, located in Germany, even had enough jurisdiction to hear matters that substantiated claims made by the wider global community. Did the German court, who only imposed a lenient sentence while finding Vanaki guilty, find themselves more concerned with the how the state could benefit from both economic and political interest's of Vanaki's illegal trades, rather than the actual perpetuation of Vanaki's crime and how that justice could be administered? It is questions such as these, while sensitive to the wider global community, which gives substantiation to the fact that the proper forum for these matters to be resolved would be a unbiased court that has no outside political or economic interest.

Natural Disaster

Currently, The International Criminal Court addresses disputes involving anthropogenic harm caused by one nation-state, to another (ICJ, 2011). While this fully enables mediation between these states, rarely addressed, and sometimes abated to non-governmental or public organizations, are instances involving the harm caused from natural destruction. According to Review of Introduction to Disaster Management, the “mitigation, preparedness, recovery, and response” (Kirschenbaum, 1, 2007) to such disasters sometimes requires a more pronounced international response. In the nation-state, Myanmar, 100,000 people were left dead while another million individuals were left displaced or homeless due to a cyclone that caused widespread destruction. Both Myanmar;s military government and General Than Shwe, the governments leader, rebuffed attempts by the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to assist in aiding the citizens of Myanmar during this horrible dilemma (Kegley, 328, 2012). When is the right of intervention clearly pronounced when governments fail to provide for the necessary welfare of the people, despite political discord? Wouldn't international intervention be imperative in instances such as these, where a government fails to respond to the call from its people?

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 1024