Illegal Wars

As is evident from the title, Michael Mandel has written an angry book. A distinguished professor of law at Osgoode, excoriates the United States on almost every page of How America Gets Away with Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes against Humanity, expands his range beyond the usual suspects of the Bush adminis- tration to include liberal icons such as Louise Arbour, Kofi Annan and Michael Ignatieff, and even takes aim at hitherto sacrosanct institutions of the international criminal justice movement such as the International Criminal Court and Human Rights Watch. Mandel is mad at everybody.

His book could be dismissed as an exercise in bile except for one inconvenient fact—he has a right to be angry. The world in general and the United States in particular ignore the norms of international law with catastrophic results. In the tradition of Zola’s “J’accuse,” Mandel accuses us all of averting our eyes from this truth. The author...