The 9/11 Attacks and the Future of Collective Security Law: Insight from Islamic Law

Abstract

An African philosophical adage says: “When children fall they look forwards, but when adults fall they look backwards.”¹ The message therein is that a sensible adult will look carefully backward to identify the cause of a fall so as to avoid it and prevent falling again when he/ she passes through that route in future. But a child would inattentively proceed forward without caring to look backward to identify the cause of its fall and will therefore fall again when it passes through that route in future. Borrowing from that philosophy, the starting point of this chapter is that the devastating aftermath of the 2003 United States (U.S.)-led invasion of Iraq places a responsibility on scholars and practitioners of international law to look carefully backward and identify relevant lessons that can be learnt from the Iraqi crisis for the future development of international law generally and Collective Security law particularly. Looking back, the 2003 U.S.-led war on Iraq does raise many legal and moral questions in relation to international law, some of which has been extensively debated by scholars and practitioners of international law.² With specific regard to Collective Security, Krisch has observed that since 9/11, Collective Security has both “been strengthened in several ways” but “has also been significantly weakened.”³ He argued that this has caused “a rise of Collective Security, as well as its fall, and both simultaneously,”⁴ which, in essence, has left Collective Security in a sort of quagmire.