The Obscurer

By now, I don’t think anyone is surpised that the Iraq Survey Group has announced there are no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Infact the worst they can say is that there is “framentary” and “circumstantial” evidence that Saddam wanted to restart a programme once the UN sanctions were removed. Was this really a good enough reason to go to war in the name of WMD.

I don’t think so. The reaction from our politicians has been risible. George Bush says Iraqi scientists still had the knowledge under Saddam to create CBRN weapons which could be passed onto terrorists; but presumably scientists with such knowledge, in Iraq or elsewhere, are able to do so if they want to, whoever is in charge of Iraq. Jack Straw says we now know the threat “in terms of intentions” was “even starker than we have seen before”; but surely not as stark as having WMD ready to fire in 45 minutes. Tony Blair has started talking about Saddam doing his best to subvert UN Sanctions, as if we went to war 18 months ago because of something the ISG has only just announced. It all seems a long way from a clear and present danger, a war we had to wage there and then as a last resort. But by now we are used to the justifications for war having changed. Jack Straw always talks of Iraq’s broken UN resolutions as if that is why we went to war, despite the fact there was no UN resolution authorising force; and anyway, surely the resolutions were about WMD, they were the mechanism and WMD still the stated reason we went to war. Tony Blair talks of not apologising for removing Saddam, and that history will forgive him, but do you remember anyone asking him to apologise for toppling the Baath party? And anyway, he specifically ruled out regime change in the run up to war.

So if the politicians think they have done nothing wrong, what about the intelligence services? According to David Kay, the former leader of the Iraq Survey Group, speaking on Channel Four News, this is the real issue, and this is where the blame ought to lie. But hold on. I remember reading plenty of newspaper articles prior to the war casting doubt on the claims of WMD in Iraq, from the likes of former UNSCOM inspector Scott Ritter. Did the Prime Minister not read them? Did he not listen to Robin Cook’s resignation speech in the Commons, when he stated Iraq probably didn’t have WMD? Or did he just not want to believe.

Before the war, I didn’t know if there were WMD in Iraq or not. I thought that Hans Blix was in a better position than me to tell, and should have been given the time he felt he needed to find out. But I also felt that George Bush was bent on regime change, whatever the cost, for whatever reason, be it oil, unfinished business, strategic interests, or all three, and that Tony Blair had already decided to support him, come what may. Nothing I have heard since has changed my mind. I think Blair probably thought there were WMD in Iraq, but in the end it didn’t really matter what the intelligence said. When your mind is made up, you will believe what you want to believe. I don’t buy the idea that Blair decided on war on a cold examination of the intelligence. That looks to me like putting the cart before the horse.

In the end Hans Blix couldn’t have put it better in one of his last speeches to the UN Security Council before the war. He said if you asked him if whether Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions then it was, but if you asked him if UNMOVIC could conclude its inspections within months then it could. Put another way, if you want an excuse for war, then you have it, but if you wanted the WMD issue settled peacefully, that could be done. We had the excuse for war, and so we went to war. That is the politicians responsibility, not the intelligence services, as Blair more or less stated, inadvertently, when he rejected a request for the Butler Enquiry to look into the use of intelligence material, on the grounds that it is up to Government to decide on the basis of information.

I don’t want Blair to apologise for the war; that is expecting too much, and anyway, I wouldn’t believe him. But surely the time has come when he should stop grasping onto any new nugget of information about how Saddam may have, if he could, once every Preston Guild, have quite liked to get some WMD, and that this vindicates a war based in an immediate threat from unconventional weapons. Surely the time is long overdue when he tells us how he can justify the war because it removed Saddam, yet still not talk of regime change. In fact the time is long overdue when someone directly asks him explain that contradiction; does he now believes in regime change, and if not, then how can he rely on it to justify the invasion. You never know, he may come clean, and explain why regime change was justified, and where and when it should be permitted in the future. I would have more respect for him if he did, and you never know; he might just convince me.

PostScript: I am sick of writing and thinking about the Iraq War now, and so hopefully this will be my last post on the subject. But I wouldn’t bet on it!

So Kofi Annan has finally been goaded by a BBC journalist into stating that the invasion of Iraq was illegal. This should come as no surprise. He had previously stated that it “lacked legitimacy”, which diplomatically speaking is the same thing. The reaction from the prosecutors of the war is understandable but still quite amusing. Embarrassment must be the main reason; it can’t be nice for for the war to be spelt out as being unlawful in such black and white terms. But really, did they honestly think they could get away with this nonsense for so long?

Most people I have spoken to who claim the war was lawful quote the British Attorney General’s legal advice which was presented to Parliament. There are two problems with this. Firstly, Lord Goldsmith is the Government’s legal advisor and he does not make the law, no more than in domestic legal affairs your solicitor makes the law. All he can do is give his opinion, just as your Solicitor can give you an opinion on a legal matter; but it is only when you get to court and the judge makes his decision that you find out whether or not he is right. Secondly, the problem with Lord Goldsmith’s advice is that it is bollocks.

Now don’t get me wrong; the Attorney General has forgotten more about the law than I will ever know, but let us look at his decision with a bit of common sense.
Firstly, taking Resolution 1441, Goldsmith states that Iraq was in material breach, which is hard to argue with. He states that as 1441 refers to all previous UN resolutions, we effectively are referred back to the situation at the time of Resolution 687. Note how he clearly admits that 1441 on its own does not authorize force. Jack Straw’s regular assertion that everyone in the UN knew that the reference to “serious consequences” in 1441 referred to war is therefore blown out of the water. Of course, we know that this is also bollocks anyway; if the members of the security council did think “serious consequences” meant war, then Resolution 1441 would never have been passed, at least not unanimously.

Secondly then, taking Resolution 687, which refers to the cease fire following the first Gulf War, he states that any material breach refers us back further to the time of Resolution 678. Again, I am not going to argue that Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions, so Goldsmith is correct to state that when 687 is invoked then Resolution 678 is subsequently re-invoked.

So then, onto Resolution 678. Unlike Resolution 1441, 678 did authorize force, in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This paved the way for the first Gulf War. It is on this basis that Goldsmith states that the second Gulf War is also considered legitimate. But Resolution 678 authorizes force only insofar as it results in the liberation of Kuwait. In other words, we can consider ourselves at war with Iraq, but with no mandate to go any further than the Kuwaiti border. In 1991, despite many people’s wish that we should “finish the job” and remove Saddam Hussein, it was clearly spelt out that there was no UN mandate for doing so.

As it was in 1991, so it was in 2003. There may be many arguments in favour of taking action in Iraq, but whatever you may think, I cannot see any way that it can be considered legal.

A further word on the UN. The article I referred to earlier, regarding the Coalition’s response to Kofi Annan, made for interesting reading I thought. Interesting that John Howard talks of the UN being a “paralyzed” body, and that Rumsfeld’s former advisor states that Annan “ultimately works for the member states”. They are both right. But if the UN is paralyzed, then the fault must often lie at the door of the individual member states themselves. Linda Polman’s book We Did Nothing shows how often the inaction and ineffectiveness of the UN is a direct consequence of the actions of the US, UK and Australia. Even the very limited involvement often proposed by the UN is undermined by the lack of willingness on the part of the richest countries to get involved in the world’s troublespots. Suddenly, however, when the US and its allies want the support of the UN, it seems it is supposed to roll over and give them whatever they want.

The UN is a deeply flawed organization, but it is the best one we currently have. Kofi Annan I think recognizes it’s weaknesses, which is why he has made tentative moves to widen the debate on pre-emption. For UN soldiers to stand by while Genocide occurs in Rwanda for example is unacceptable, but in the Sudan it does look like we are moving towards a situation where the Blue Helmets, along with African Union soldiers, can be more than just “peace-keepers”.

However, for speakers from the US administration to criticise the UN is hilarious. Here is an administration choc-full of neo-cons, who’s philosophy as outlined in the Project for the New American Century is to sideline the UN in order to promote unilateral “American global leadership”, but claims, when invading Iraq, to partly be doing so in order to uphold UN resolutions; yet it does so without a UN mandate, by ignoring the will of the Security Council, and in defiance of what there is of International Law. Was hypocrisy was ever more clear cut?

Of course, in many ways, George Bush’s decision to withdraw American troops from around the world makes a lot of sense. With the end of the Cold War it if fairly evident that NATO is pretty much an anachronism, although it is obviously in certain peoples best interests to deny this when the mood suits. So the proposed withdrawal from Germany is just common sense. Many of the other withdrawals can be seen in the same light; changing tactics for a changed world situation.

But what about the removal of troops from South Korea? Isn’t North Korea part of the Axis of Evil? Isn’t North Korea just about the most repressive and repulsive regime in the world today? Doesn’t it claim, with good cause, to already have Nuclear weapons? Unless Bush is about to announce a remarkable piece of diplomacy between the US and North Korea, isn’t it wise to leave some American troops in South Korea, just in case?

Perhaps. But let’s go back a little, to the run up to the Iraq War. The main reason given for going to war was of course Weapons of Mass Destruction, but when this was challenged by the anti-war brigade Blair and Bush would also start talking about Baghdad’s links with terrorists, and also the barbaric nature of the Saddam dictatorship.

I opposed the war, and there were many good arguments against it; that with regard to WMD the UNMOVIC inspectors should be left to do their job, and that Iraq almost certainly had no links to al-qaeda. But there were two issues on which I differed with the many of those against the war.

Firstly, I always felt a little uneasy at the back of my mind, arguing against a war which would at least rid the world of a monster. Of course the humanitarian removal of Saddam was irrelevant to the reason for war, but it was still there, and the few pro-war commentators who I respected (David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, Christopher Hitchens, although the latter has lost it big-time in his bizarre criticism of Fahrenheit 911) all made this element key to their support for pre-emptive war. Unfortunately, as far as I could see, they never offered up a framework where future invasions could or could not be justified; in fact as many writers have noted, the idea of pre-emptive war for humanitarian reasons had previously been used by the likes of Hitler in the Sudetenland and Mussolini in Abyssinia. If there is to be humanitarian pre-emption, surely it has to be an instrument of the UN, and not individual Nation States?

Secondly, one thing those who opposed the war often said was “after Iraq, where is next?”. I may well have said the same myself at one time, but soon I began to question this criticism of the war. I have no doubt some of the hawks in the USA would like to invade further countries, as the Project for the New American Century suggested, although mainly for the US self-interest rather than for any altruistic reason. However, the sheer cost of the invasion, with Bush having to go to Congress for a vastly increased defense budget, was something I felt even the United States could not afford to keep doing. With the current situation in Iraq still worsening, the idea of another war seems further away, and the proposed recall of troops from South Korea, surely in the front line against the Axis of Evil, seems to strengthen this theory.

Those who supported the war in the belief that a New World Order of benevolent pre-emption would rid the world of its despots are likely to be dissappointed.That was never going to happen. That wasn’t why we went to war. For them, the fact that there isn’t going to be a “next war” is another reason not to have supported the last one.