Who's Got the Title? or, The Remnants of Debellatio in Post-Invasion Iraq

摘要

The invasion of Iraq by the British and U.S.-led Coalition forces in March 2003 silently effected debellatio, the ancient doctrine by which a military victor takes title to territory in which the defeated government has ceased to function. The Coalition governments' failure to recognize it as such and to invoke the attendant legal consequences enabled destructive chaos on the ground and created a troubling precedent for the application of international law to any future exercise of one sovereign state's authority within the geographical boundaries of another sovereign state. The Coalition forces ostensibly acted pursuant to the international law of occupation, but the legal framework ultimately agreed upon and actually utilized in post-invasion Iraq more closely resembles debellatio. Though this doctrine traditionally is associated with conquest and annexation, it need not be; as updated by modern ideas of self-determination and what I call "sovereign identity," it is in fact the extant doctrine most consistent with the factual and legal situation caused by the invasion.