Glenn says:

From Justice Jackson's opening statement at Nuremberg, Nov. 21, 1945:

Any resort to war — any kind of war — is a resort to means that are inherently criminal. War inevitably is a course of killings, assaults, deprivations of liberty and destruction of property. An honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality. But inherently criminal acts cannot be defended by showing that those who committed them were engaged in a war, when war itself is illegal.

Based on this reasoning, then, I presume you think that every member of any country's armed forces that participated in the invasion and occupation of Iraq is a war criminal? That's a question, not a "straw man" argument.

Perhaps not a straw man, more like "moving the goal posts". We started out talking about US generals and now have moved to all the members of all the armies of the world. But I'm surprised that you are not familiar with the Nuremberg proceedings, or at least the Nuremberg principles <http://www.nuclearfiles.org/etinternationallaw/nurembergprinciples.html> which are now a part of international law. In particular, Principle IV states:

Principle IV. The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

This is why I included the caveat "who has a viable alternative to obeying the order" in my statement. Those below a certain rank do not have a moral choice available. US enlisted men take an oath to obey the orders of the President and the officers appointed over them. In other armies one may face the risk of being shot on the spot for failing to obey an order. For these people there is no moral choice but to participate. But the same is not true of US officers of flag rank.

And, for that matter, Saddam Hussein and the entire Iraqi Army that waged war on Iran were also war criminals?

Saddam Hussein certainly. If he had lived long enough he might have been tried and convicted. That, however, would have given the Iranians both a great deal of pleasure and a significant propaganda boost so it didn't happen. As for the rest of his army, likely they did not have a moral choice available as Saddam himself would likely have shot anyone who failed to comply on the spot. Therefore, by Principle IV they are not war criminals by international law. This is all laid out in the Nuremberg trials and is the explanation why most of the German General Staff were not prosecuted as war criminals. Below a certain level, "following orders" is a defense.

The very minimum legal consequence of the treaties making aggressive war illegal is to strip those who incite or wage them of every defense the law ever gave, and to leave the war-makers subject to judgment by the usually accepted principles of the law of crimes.

This is a completely different argument from the one ondelette was making and to which I was responding.

Under our Constitution, American law is determined by the acts of the Congress and the President. Treaties become American law, but they can also be abrogated -- perhpas by the President, but certainly by subsequent acts of Congress.

Thus, under ondelette's argument, at least as I understand it, which is based on the Constitution, a war that is legally endorsed by Congress and ordered by the President is not a war that a military officer has the right to disobey, because it is a legal (i.e. constitutionally authorized) decision.

Your argument is the opposite -- that American law is irrelevant, that even if American law duly authorizes an "agressive war," it is still illegal.

You may have noticed that ondelette also invoked the UN charter which is the instrument that makes "agressive war" illegal (along with the Nuremberg Principles which have been incorporated in international law (1950). The UN Charter makes it clear that use of military force except in self-defense cannot be undertaken without the approval of the UN Security Council. Basically, no self-defense, no legal war without the UNSC's say-so. If the US wants to invade Iraq because it has a tyrannical leader or because it has lots of oil ("floats on a sea of it" in fact), or because its people are longing for democracy, without UNSC approval such an invasion is illegal under international law. Of course, no one is going to prosecute anyone in the US for war crimes for invading Iraq and the US neatly ducked out of the ICC as soon as it decided to invade Iraq so there would be no jurisdiction there and you are, as you have stated previously, opposed to the universal jurisdiction over war crimes levied by the Geneva Conventions, so there is no remedy.