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Volume 24, Numbers 3 & 4 (2000) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum INTERNATIONAL LAW ON FILM ANTHONY CHASE* Robert W. Gregg, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS ON FILM Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Reinner Publishing, 1998 Popular constructions of legal reality tell us something (but not everything) about the nature of that reality while, at the same time, those popular perceptions are constituent elements in the social process by which any legal culture becomes recognizable to own its participants. The American television series, “Law and Order,” for example, can be studied for the purpose of better understanding the nature of the criminal justice system in the United States. But however accurate, or inaccurate, a picture of the system television provides, that picture is constantly in the process of helping reshape the social reality to which it refers. Criminal trials, for example, are often shaped in part by juries; by groups of citizens who are, simultaneously, official participants in a specific instance of legal decisionmaking and also consumers of popular images of the law, like those which make up the communication embodied in “Law and Order.”4 Popular images never tell us as much as we would like to know about a society or social system. And popular perceptions are themselves rooted in and necessarily limited by the material reality, the political and economic conditions, on which the actual process of social construction is founded. While popular cultures and their ideologies rarely seem decisive in the development of social history, they nevertheless make their own, special contribution, which we ought to allow some room within our theories of society and social development– at least so long as we wish to get the big picture. One aspect of law and legal structure which has developed, over time, its own popular culture, however obscure, and which has remained relatively unexamined, even within the growing field of law and cultural studies, is that of international law and the international system of legal relations. This essay is a brief foray into that undeveloped field of research–-an overture to the study of international law’s popular culture. While study of international law in the United States is generally, but not exclusively, confined to law schools, the ancillary disciplines of diplomatic history and international relations, which are lodged outside legal education but still generally within the university, schools of foreign service, or military academies, are no longer without an initial inquiry into their respective popular cultures. To be sure, Robert W. Gregg, in his new book, International Relations on Film, approaches films about international relations much as a classroom teacher would, exploring film as a tool for study, an alternative source of information about the primary subject, international relations. He does not attempt to determine how film consumption by mass audiences around the world may have an impact on world politics and, thus indirectly, on the way that international relations themselves function. With Hitler and Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt shared a conviction that radio and film would have an enormous influence upon mass politics in the twentieth century. Roosevelt was not wrong. But attempting to analyze not only the rate, but also the content and effect, of film consumption on a world scale, and then transcribe that critique in terms of a theory of popular culture’s construction of international relations, would represent a herculean task, perhaps beyond the reach of contemporary social science. But while more modest, what Robert Gregg does accomplish is worthwhile. He initiates a discussion of how films which touch upon issues of international relations can tell us something about their focus which the traditional textbooks and professor’s lectures cannot, or at least have not. The way Gregg divides up the material of international relations study, the categories he employs and into which he fits separate groups of motion pictures, constitute the most promising aspect of his work. The dilemmas of sovereignty, nationalism and its discontents, civil strife and intervention, espionage and subversion, dedcisionmaking and crisis management, the tragedy of war, economic interdependence and development, for example, seem absolutely central categories to the sort of inquiry in which Gregg wishes his readers to engage and he includes all of these and more. In each of these categories, Gregg has identified several films worth considering that virtually everyone interested in the field would be willing to include, and a number which most would not think of but which, on reflection, clearly belong. At times, however, Gregg seems to be stretching to include films whose relation to the subject of international politics seems metaphoric, at best. In a discussion of the emergence and significance of the sovereign state, for example, inclusion of a film like A Man for All Seasons is clearly inescapable. Passport to Pimlico, however, a postwar British comedy, initially appears to be a rather odd choice, but Gregg’s analysis of the film makes it seem a perfect fit. “A London neighborhood,” as Gregg observes, “opts to declare its independence from the crown following the discovery in a local bomb crater of an old and forgotten treaty that proves it really is a part of the medieval kingdom of Burgundy.”5 Complications which ensue–illustrating the burdens, as well as benefits, of sovereignty (especially economic ones)–soon cause Pimlican nationals to wonder if independence is all that it is cracked up to be. Gregg is right to point out that The French Connection may have clued in the mass audience to transnational aspects of the illegal heroin trade. But in spite of its surface realism (even documentary touches), The French Connection remains a classic crime film with an especially original ‘chase scene.’ It lacks the sophistication of, for example, Masterpiece Theatre’s Traffik, made for public television by Carnival films. “Viewers are familiar with countless dramas about drugs,” observes Terrence O’Flaherty, “told from the sordid standpoint of addicts or the hazardous viewpoint of the police [but] Traffik takes a different look at heroin–as a well-organized, high-profit business.”6 Again, in his discussion of international decisionmaking and crisis management, Gregg appropriately gives focus to the late Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove, a film which Gregg obviously much admires. And he introduces his readers to “another film made for television,” Reilly: The Ace of Spies, which provided Public Broadcast System viewers with an insight into the way “policymakers may ignore danger signals because they are inconsistent with their mental image of another country.”7 In this instance, intelligence officer Sydney Reilly warns political leaders in both Britain and Russia of the impending Japanese invasion of Manchuria, to no avail, thus illustrating “Jervis’s dictum that decisionmakers see what they expect to see.”8 Finally, a discussion of Lord of the Flies, now available to viewers in more than one filmed version, seems to go a bit far afield. One of Gregg’s best chapters is the one on espionage and subversion. In a field where it would be easy to go wrong, Gregg manages not only to identify crucial films (e.g., Across the Pacific, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Ipcress File, Russia House) but also a couple (Pickup on South Street, Six Days of the Condor) which are quite important and might have been missed by others attempting to identify benchmark films. His initial reference to one of Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite pictures, “Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street,” suggests Gregg is no novice when it comes to serious film study-–a discipline which includes the auteur theory, closely identifying many Hollywood films with a pantheon of directorial stylists or “auteurs”, like Howard Hawks, Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray, and Sam Fuller.9 Gregg’s highlighting of Foreign Correspondent compensates, to a degree, for his omission of other Hitchcock espionage classics (e.g., The Thirty-Nine Steps, Saboteur, North by Northwest, Topaz, and Torn Curtain). His reliance upon one valuable work of motion picture scholarship, The Great Spy Films, admittedly does not explain the absence of any reference to a range of outstanding work on espionage narrative, albeit in fiction as well as film.10 The only chapter of International Relations on Film which deals directly with questions of law and legal culture is the one titled, “Ethics and International Law.” This coupling of the international legal system with ethics or morality tips off the reader to Gregg’s outdated notion of international law. Describing the legal role performed by government in domestic political systems, Gregg asserts that “[i]nternationally, there is no such government, much less one possessing a preponderance of force and enjoying a monopoly of the legitimate use of force.”11 Thus in the absence of police, courts, compelled legal compliance, etc., inter-national society is as formally anarchic as would be domestic society in the absence of these same institutional structures. Reading the few pages of Gregg’s book on these issues, one almost has to wonder what planet he has been living on for the past decade. As Rick Atkinson describes in his book on the Gulf War, the force whose use was authorized by the United Nations for the purpose of evicting Iraq’s military from Kuwait was not only effective but, in fact, overwhelming.12 Similarly, NATO’s use of force in the Balkans in 1999 not only secured an end to the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Serbian regime in Kosovo but set the stage for war crimes trials, following principles set down at Nuremberg at the end of the Second World War. Reflecting on these same developments over the past ten years, law professor David Westbrook has concluded that “[i]nternational law is now, if as yet only intermittently, enforceable, and the hoary criticism of international law, that it is not law because it has no enforcement mechanism, has been answered on its own terms.”13 In fairness to Gregg, popular culture may continue to embrace his now-dated view of international law and its organizations. In Bryan Singer’s X-Men, for example, a film which loyally transfers to the big screen some of the most cherished of all Marvel comicbook characters, the United Nations is a target of Magneto’s X-Men faction. It is hard to say whether the inadequacy of the U.N. and its hapless officials in coping with X-Men high jinx reflects a popular perception of the U.N. as a “paper tiger” or, instead, simply reflects the formulaic ineptitude routinely assigned to established, merely human, governments and armies in this kind of science fiction film. The portion of Gregg’s analysis that deals with movies touching upon international moral debates (e.g., was the U.S. justified in its use of atomic weapons against Japan?) seems less relevant to questions of international law than the films he covers which deal with the dramatic subject of human rights. And here, as in so much of his book, his choice of films (The Wannsee Conference, Judgment at Nuremberg, The Killing Fields, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Official Story, Beyond Rangoon) provides the architecture for a genuinely insightful, if preliminary, treatment of the really crucial issues. What would a more elaborate critique of film’s reflection upon international law and legal relations look like? An outline, at any rate, may be sketched here. The three main themes of international law illuminated by motion pictures can be explored in terms of sovereignty, idealism, and consensus. Gregg utilizes A Man For All Seasons to highlight the emergence of the sovereign state as the dominant political institution in the world system-–and not without reason. In A Man For All Seasons, as Gregg points out, “the conflict is between [Henry VIII of England] and his lord chancellor, Thomas More, who refuses to swear an oath accepting the king as supreme head of the church of England. . . .”14 To be sure, Fred Zinnemann’s film, reflecting the particular concerns of Robert Bolt’s fluently written play, presents the essential drama as one of conscience versus convenience, legal principle versus political pressure. In reality, however, the historical issue involved in More’s resistance to royal authority was whether a universal institution, the Church, would continue to hold sway over local political rulers. “With the emergence of the state system,” observe Anthony Clark Arend and Robert J. Beck, “there also developed a new theoretical doctrine to explain the status of the state–the doctrine of sovereignty.”15 And as Arend and Beck explain, the doctrine of sovereignty became the ordering principle of the new state system which necessarily superseded the authority of universal doctrines and institutions. Individual states (and their rulers) became the final arbiter of their own conduct and no “pope or emperor had temporal control over them.”16 Thus Thomas More fought his battle against the state on the wrong side of history, as it were, and fell victim to the emerging authority of secular rulers like Henry VIII. “In 1648,” conclude Arend and Beck, “the doctrine of sovereignty achieved ‘codification’ with the adoption of the Peace of Westphalia, which brought an end to the devastating Thirty Years War.”17 One of the principles of the Peace of Westphalia was an agreement that there would be no interference with the right of sovereign leaders to determine what religion would prevail in their national territory. Here was a principle which Thomas More’s supranational allegiance to the Church could not survive. An important aspect of this ‘liberation’ of sovereign particularism from the ‘chains’ of theocratic universalism is the transformation of social consciousness which accompanied the separation of state from society. Perhaps the crucial belief, according to Roberto Unger, “is the notion that social relations are and ought to be an object of human will. Such a conception contrasts with the earlier and more universal idea of society as the expression of an order that men do not and ought not control.”18 Thus the historical development of sovereignty, and the social consciousness which it reflects, eventually leads to the decline of monarchy and its ideology–the divine right of kings–as well as the eclipse of a theocratic universalism. This aspect of the emergence of state sovereignty is perhaps best illustrated by the opening sequence in Roberto Rossellini’s La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV. The films opens, as Peter Brunette explains, “with a static, painterly long shot of peasants at a dock across the river from a castle.” This scene serves “as a kind of earthy counter to everything that follows” with the peasants speaking “disparagingly of the English king who has just been beheaded, and briefly complain about the prerogatives of wealth and authority.”19 While acknowledging the materialist technique of Rossellini’s cinema, Brunette disputes James Roy MacBean’s claim that Rossellini intended the much-discussed opening scene of La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV to reveal the social and economic foundations of the French monarchy. Nevertheless, Rossellini’s response to a question put to him during an interview in Madrid, in 1970, should be carefully noted. He was asked, “Do you agree with the Marxist theory that behavior and superstructural phenomena depend on the economic system?” Rossellini replied, “Yes, of course. Such ideas are very important . . .” and added he hoped events which, by decade’s end, seemed to characterize the 1960s for many Europeans might indicate that the authority of economics was being eroded.20 It is easy to imagine Rossellini abandoning that hope today, were he still alive and able to survey the post-cold war triumph of global capitalism. A crucial feature in the development of international law has been its conflict with the system of sovereign states. Of course, if one regards international law as the system of legal rules governing relations between states to which they have themselves consented, then there is no conflict between the primacy of the sovereign state and the notion of international law as law. On this theory, a state is only bound by international law if it has chosen, in advance, to accept or submit to a particular rule or regime of regulation. That acceptance is evidenced through treaties and through state conduct, the customary practice of nations. Thus the preeminent authority of the state is not in question. If, on the other hand, one rejects the view–as do those legal scholars of a positivist bent–that law can be reduced to a system of merely voluntary state practice, then the reality of international law hinges upon the development of adequate mechanisms of legal enforcement. In the absence of an international government above the level of states, supported by effective institutions able to secure enforcement of that superior will, positivists have been disinclined to recognize international law as law, unwilling to differentiate a purported system of international law from the political balance of power structuring international society at any given moment in history. The “conception of legal obligation as growing out of customary practice,” international law professors Steiner, Vagts, and Koh concede, “is of course antagonistic to the assertion that only those commands issuing from the state that are backed by threats of force merit characterization as law.”21 Thus we may underscore a second major theme of international law’s popular culture: that of idealism. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was apparent to all that the sovereignty of the state was unimpeded by notions of international law and war itself had come to be regarded as the “litigation of nations.” In international law, “aggression” was not even defined, let alone effectively prohibited. The catastrophic human consequences of the First World War served as a wake up call not just for politicians and diplomats but whole populations as well. The mass public in industrialized societies had come face to face with the horrors war would inflict, in the twentieth century, not only upon soldiers but upon civilians as well. However idealistic it might seem, placing real limitations on the destructive power of militarism and armed conflict had once again to be placed on the legal and political agenda. No film better illustrates the theme of idealism in international law than the Hollywood biopic, Wilson, made in 1944 by Twentieth Century-Fox. “Wilson was not so much about the man,” argues Terry Christensen, “as about the peace treaty ending World War I and the need for international cooperation, ‘the dream of a world united against the dreadful waste of war.’ [Darryl] Zanuck’s epic argued that the League of Nations and collective security might have prevented World War II.”22 While the notion that war was an inescapable, if regrettable, feature of social life was regarded by some as sober realism, idealists countered that, far from being part of human nature, armed conflict could be avoided and institutions like the League of Nations, if adequately supported, held out the possibility of outlawing war. President Wilson’s personal battle for ratification of the League of Nations treaty by the U.S. Congress failed and the story of his heroic crusade, admittedly, did not have a happy ending. But Wilson, released in theaters across the country near the end of the Second World War, “implied that America had to make that happy ending through the United Nations or face the consequences.”23 Wilson’s lonely advocacy of the League of Nations, the ambitious plans of the founders and supporters of the U.N., pacifism and anti-nuclear movements, resistance to positivist skepticism by proponents of international law and diplomacy–all of these forces illustrate an idealist side to the unfolding dialectic of modern political history. But Zannuck’s Wilson can also be seen as a film which epitomizes a different kind of idealism, that of the philosophers who contrast idealism with materialism. In this usage, idealism refers to a way of thinking about history in which ideas themselves are seen as a decisive force in shaping history– rather than as a reflection of social and economic institutions and their contradictions. Ironically, Wilson illustrates just as effectively this second meaning of idealism. Note, in particular, Christensen’s plausible reading of Wilson, suggesting that the League of Nations, had it only received enthusiastic international support, might have been able to prevent the Second World War. Within the cannons of idealist philosophy, it is entirely rational to believe that as profound an historical development as a world war could actually be prevented by a way of thinking about war and peace. An intellectual construction (e.g., theory of peace) or a movement of legal thought and its institutional embodiment (like the League of Nations) could, according to idealists, have sufficient force to compel history and politics to flow in their wake. Materialist social and political theory remains skeptical. One version of materialist theory indicates that the central contradiction at the heart of international politics in the first half of the twentieth-century was the conflict betweens liberal and authoritarian capitalism.24 World systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein has, in fact, argued that “the end of the First World War represented far more a truce in a ‘thirty years war’ than a definitive victory for the Allies.”25 Thus the “failure” of the League of Nations, coming as it did during what was merely a truce in the global struggle between the Allies and their adversaries, between liberal and authoritarian capitalism, was not so much inconsequential as inevitable. No regime of law could have prevented the Second World War. And only the total defeat of Nazi Germany permitted invocation of Nuremberg’s legal principles and the regulation of crimes against humanity. Neither the League of Nations nor any other regime of international legality could possibly succeed until after the fundamental conflict at the heart of the century’s politics had been resolved. Only the kind of global social and economic reordering, which came at the end of the Second World War, could provide the foundation for an institutionalization of international legal principles. And even that institutional initiative, symbolized by the United Nations, would be relatively powerless in the face of a new bipolarity in world affairs: that of the Cold War. Thus while the law of nations is no pipe dream, as some of the “realists” in foreign affairs theory would have it, international law’s effectiveness at any given point in history necessarily hinges on economic, military, and political realities which constitute the infrastructural foundation on top of which all superstructural formations (like law and legal systems) are built. Or, at least, so say materialist social thinkers. Following this line of reasoning, we can assert that the end of the Cold War, whether or not it constitutes Francis Fukuyama’s widely discussed, “end of history,” certainly represents a watershed in the histori-cal development of international law. The globalization of capitalist social relations and the corporate form of economic organization has real implications for the relative independence and authority of the sovereign state on the world scene. And the resolution of, first, the conflict between liberal and authoritarian capitalism and, second, between capitalism and communism, makes possible a consensus about political values and interests on which a credible regime of international law can finally be constructed. Thus to La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV and Wilson, we may now add a third motion picture in our preliminary sketch of international law’s popular culture: the Gulf War film, Three Kings. And to sovereignty and idealism, we can add a third theme in this developing cultural critique, that of consensus. Whether or not one agrees that George Bush’s war to eject Iraq’s military from Kuwait represented the first battle in behalf of a “new world order,” it was certainly the product of a remarkable political consensus, one which found Americans and Russians voting together in the United Nations Security Council in a way they had never done before. It will, of course, be recalled that when the U.N. Security Council authorized the use of force in Korea in 1950, the representative of the Soviet Union was boycotting the Council and was not present to veto the proposed U.N., or better still, U.S. use of force in Korea.26 But the Russian, albeit no longer Soviet, representative was indeed present, and voting with the U.S., on the day in 1990 when the Security Council authorized the use of force in the Gulf for the purpose of restoring Kuwait’s territorial independence.27 Another name for that independence, to be sure, is national sovereignty and the Gulf War could still be seen as a war in behalf of the legal rights of the sovereign state. But the supremacy of the nation state, as the final arbiter of international legality, is certainly placed in question when the United Nations Security Council displays the kind of consensus it did in the Gulf War–a consensus sufficient to provide legal authorization, under the U.N. Charter, for a use of force designed to secure restoration of peace and security in the Middle East. There is another way in which the Gulf War can be seen as a war designed to shore up an old, rather than new, world order. In one of the key sequences in Three Kings, an American soldier who has been captured by the Iraquis is being brutally interrogated. An Iraqui captain, who claims his son was killed during the U.S. bombing of Baghdad and that he was, himself, trained in torture techniques by the Americans during Iraq’s war with Iran, demands to have the American explain to him why the U.S. is making war in the desert. The American replies that he is fighting because Iraq invaded Kuwait and “that is wrong.” The Iraqui scoffs and tries to force the American to taste the real reason for the war by pouring oil down his throat. Describing this same scene in director David O. Russell’s Gulf War film, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman states that unlike most “Hollywood movies, Three Kings does not consign the Arab foe to absolute cultural Otherness. Russell not only visualises bombed Iraqui children but even has the guts to point out that, having tilted toward Iraq during its war with Iran, the US helped to train Sadam’s killers - even if he does put the thesis that Desert Storm was fought for Kuwaiti oil in the mouth of the scariest of the movie’s ‘wog’ villains. . . .”28 If we are convinced by this argument, regardless of who is making it, then the Gulf War should be seen as little more than old fashioned imperialist, or “gun boat” diplomacy, masquerading as U.N. peacekeeping or peace restoration. I think Three Kings, rather even-handedly, includes this thesis without subscribing to it. The film’s action does not begin until after the Gulf War has ended, when its protagonists launch a freelance mission of their own to convert to their possession some of the gold bullion which they believe the Iraqis have stolen from Kuwait. Kings, indeed, not just Gulf War vets, they intend to become. But Three Kings remains, in essence, a war film. What kind of war film? “Our heroes,” suggests Salon contributing writer, Andrew O’Hehir, “have stumbled into the middle of a civil war, in which the Republican Guard is systematically wiping out anti-Saddam insurgents, who are under the painfully false impression that the Americans will support their rebellion. Once [George Clooney’s] Archie [Gates] sees a village woman shot dead in front of him, we know what’s coming. He may be a Special Forces commando, but as with any Clooney character, his sense of chivalry easily overmatches his instinct for self-preservation.”29 If we emphasize the role played by chivalry in Hollywood’s male action cinema, then we have just one more reason for regarding Three Kings, and its historical subject, as more of the same, rather than as something original and important. “Sure,” says M.I.T. film critic, Michael Frakes, following this particular line of analysis, “Three Kings is the first film to address certain issues about the Gulf War and it does a good job of presenting them, but it has a very traditional plot structure. We’ve seen all these character types before and it is not hard to predict the film’s Hollywood ending.”30 Perhaps. But I am more in agreement with Hoberman when he argues that Three Kings “at least deserves credit for rethinking the combat-movie genre in the weird we-are-the-world terms that Desert Storm established.”31 What exactly might that mean? The Gulf War was fought to reinforce the international legal principle of sovereign equality of states. No nation has a right to annex another nation. Thus most Arab countries supported the U.N. action in the Gulf. Three Kings begins as the Gulf War ends. It is about another war, a civil war in O’Hehir’s reference, between Iraq’s Republican Guard, on the one hand, and national and ethnic minorities resisting Saddam Hussein’s regime, on the other. When push comes to shove, the American commandoes are not so much soldiers of fortune (though they would like to be) as they are existential volunteers for the party of humanity, willing in a pinch to deploy not just violence but their considerable strategic intelligence in behalf of human rights. To put it bluntly, Three Kings reflects a Gulf War seen, in hindsight, through the optic of NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. The Clinton administration’s effort to stop “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia took place, of course, only months before the release of Three Kings and I am not suggesting it actually contributed to the making of the film. But it’s timing necessarily caused the Balkan crisis to help shape the way that audiences look at the film and therefore, in a sense, what the film means. As well it should. The Vietnamese revolution may have threatened, or at least may have been perceived by the U.S. as a threat to, western capitalist hegemony. The Gulf War, at least in the view of Iraq’s soldiers in Three Kings, was a war for oil, another conflict in the checkered history of international petroleum politics. But it is harder to sustain this critique in the case of NATO’s action in Yugoslavia. If the United States acted to protect Albanian Kosovars from the Serbian regime in Belgrade for the humanitarian reasons which political leaders like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Vaclev Havel have stated, then Three Kings can be seen as a film which helps to bridge the transition in American foreign affairs from the end of cold war bipolarity to a new era of international consensus on human rights. Opponents of permanent normalization in U.S. trade relations with China may be less than convinced that human rights have been thus elevated in the canons of either American foreign policy or international law. But the kind of questions which international human rights advocates–and other critics of globalization–are raising seem to be the same sort of questions which are confronted by the ragtag band of would-be-royalty in Three Kings. Is their decision to take their chances with the anti-Saddam rebels less believable than Humphrey Bogart’s throwing in his lot with the Resistance forces in Casablanca? It is no small virtue that popular culture invites us to think about ourselves in this way. “The relaxation of East-West tensions after 1989 and the successful prosecution of the Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991 raised the possibility that the United Nations may be poised to assume more responsibility for maintaining and restoring ‘international peace and security.’ During the Persian Gulf War, the five Great Powers were able to act more or less in concert. Accordingly, and remarkably, the Security Council was able to vote to condemn Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait . . .” Malcolm N. Shaw, INTERNATIONAL LAW 710-711 (3rd ed., 1995): The armed action commenced on 16 January 1991 by a coalition of states under the leadership of the United States can thus be seen as a legitimate use of force authorised by the UN Security Council under its enforcement powers elaborated in Chapter VII of the UN Charter . . . It is, in fact, an example of how the Security Council was intended to function from the start, with the proviso that it had been hoped initially that the Council would have at its disposal UN-dedicated units rather than having to rely upon member-states to organise the logistical and operational aspects of the action. This operation constitutes therefore a watershed in UN history. 28. J. Hoberman, “Burn, Blast, Bomb, Cut,” Sight and Sound, <http://bfi.org.uk> (February, 2000). 29. Andrew O’Hehir, “Three Kings,” Arts & Entertainment, <http://salon.com> (Oct. 1, 1999). 30. Michael Frakes, “Film Review: Three Kings,” The Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vol. 119, No. 49 (Wed., Oct. 13, 1999). 31. Hoberman, supra note 28. |
