Who's Got the Title - or, The Remnants of Debellatio in Post-Invasion Iraq
![handle is hein.journals/hilj47 and id is 475 raw text is: VOLUME 47, NUMBER 2, SUMMER 2006
Who's Got the Title?
or,
The Remnants of Debellatio in
Post-Invasion Iraq*
Melissa Patterson**
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 geo-
graphical boundaries of another sovereign state. The Coalition forces osten-
sibly acted pursuant to the international law of occupation, but the legal frame-
work ultimately agreed upon and actually utilized in post-invasion Iraq
more closely resembles debellatio. Though this doctrine traditionally is asso-
ciated 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.1
In what was perhaps an understandable bid to constrain U.S. and British
power, the United Nations labeled the Coalition occupying powers,2 thereby
invoking the body of international occupation law traditionally applicable only
* This Note won the Harvard International Law Journal's 2005 Student Note Competition.
** J.D., Harvard Law School, 2006. The author would like to thank Professor Noah Feldman for his
comments on an earlier draft of this Note.
1. The Coalition's foray into nation-building highlights the need for the formulation of a new doc-
trine to fill the void left by the demise of the trustee and mandate systems, as do recent peace-building
exercises. See Saira Mohamed, Note, From Keeping Peace to Building Peace: A Proposalfor a Revitalized United
Nations Trusteeship Council, 105 COLUM. L. REV. 809 (2005). Prior to the Coalition's invasion of Iraq, the
particular problem of occupation law's clumsy fit with nation-building had not come to the forefront
because operations undertaken pursuant to Security Council authorization simply did not purport to be
constrained by occupation law. See David J. Scheffer, Future Implications of the Iraq Conflict: Beyond Occupa-
tion Law, 97 AM. J. INT'L L. 842, 852-53 & n.48 (2003) (None of the Security Council resolutions or
international agreements governing these deployments [in Haiti, East Timor, Bosnia and Herzegovina,
Kosovo, and Afghanistan] invokes occupation law. Rather, the mandates set forth specific tasks for the
military deployments on and civilian administration of the relevant territories.).
2. S.C. Res. 1483, pmbl., U.N. Doc. S/RES/1483 (May 22, 2003).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/hilj47&div=18&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Who's Got the Title - or, The Remnants of Debellatio in Post-Invasion Iraq
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