Lessons for us all in Gaza bloodshed

The second important lesson to be learned from the Middle East conflict is that international law is an illusion. It is a figment of an international lawyer's teenage yearning for certainty and order in a world where the only end geopolitical game remains "might is right".

No doubt there will ultimately be a cessation to hostilities between Israel and Hamas, but the terms on which it is reached will have nothing to do with the supposed tenets of international law.

When the global stakes are high, international law goes out the door. The most cardinal prohibition in international law is the prohibition of the use of force against another state. Since World War II, the US, whose military and economic dominance is unrivalled in human history, has used force against another state on more than 30 occasions, the most notable examples being Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cambodia, Grenada, Afghanistan and Iraq (twice).

Arguably, some of these interventions were lawful. Almost certainly some were not, such as Nicaragua and the second Iraq campaign. Despite this, the sum total of the adverse consequences that have been imposed against the US, as a result of the implementation of international law, is zero.

This reveals a fundamental shortcoming of the international law system: it is more akin to a system of etiquette rather than a prescriptive set of rules.

In the latest Middle East conflict, the UN has predictably been shown to be impotent when it matters.

The sorry spectacle the UN has become is symptomatic of the dysfunctionality that has emerged as a result of the structural bias towards those powers that emerged triumphant in 1945.

The engine room of the UN, the Security Council, is controlled by the fab five, consisting of the US, Britain, China, Russia and France. The veto power wielded by these countries gives them effective immunity from tangible international law sanctions being applied against them and their allies.

The power exerted by the permanent members of the Security Council, greatly in excess of their contemporary economic significance, has prevented the UN from functioning as anything like an effective parliament for the world community.

There is only one principled method for developing an effective system of international law. This involves the establishment of a new (de facto) world legislature that adopts at the international level the same best-practice model of governance that exists at the domestic level: democracy.

In this new body, the G193 (the present number of nations in the world), voting would be commensurate with the population in each country. There is no other fair basis for representation.

In the end, people are the only currency that counts, and they all count equally.

The principle of democracy is not only a desirable political ideal but also has a sound normative justification. Democracy is forced on us by the absence of any ethical basis for valuing the interests of one person more than those of another.

Until such a process occurs, international law will remain a system of global etiquette: always followed, except when it is contrary to the important interests of powerful states.

It seems that in 2009, human nature will remain as expedient and brutal as at any time in history.