Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. The #UNSC reaction to the conflict is a major challenge for those who see international institutions, laws, and collective mechanisms as a reliable tool for creating security... (thread)

There had been friction between Iran and Iraq for months, but it's very hard to see the Iraqi invasion of 9/22/1980 as anything other than a severe breach of international law, totally at odds with the UN Charter, and that the Security Council should have responded decisively.

Instead, you get Resolution 479 which calls on *both* sides to settle the dispute peacefully and stop using force. Immediate implementation of the resolution would have left Iraq in control of what it had illegally seized. https://undocs.org/en/S/RES/479(1980)

Iran was diplomatically isolated at the time of the invasion, but if laws and institutions make the international system go and are reliable sources of security, that shouldn't have mattered - aggression being, above all, the thing those institutions were supposed to prevent.