I’ve been going back and watching the video of the Chilcot Inquiry before I caught on to it. These are a few quotes from the November 2009 testimony of Sir Jeremy Greenstock – UK Ambassador to the UN 1998-2003. After the years of listening to the simplistic political dialogue in our country, listening to this man actually made me tear up several times. He is a deeply thoughtful person who was in the thick of the UN negotiations prior to the war. It wasn’t just his conclusions, it was the depth of thought he brought to the enterprise, and his capacity to frame the issues involved. It also gave me more respect for Colin Powell’s role. Faced with the intransigent Bush Administration, he seems to have had a yoeman’s go at doing the right thing. Here are a few of Greenstock’s comments:
Our Opportunity Lost: It was extraordinary to me, given the divisions in the United Nations at the beginning of September 2001 and given the, shall we say, geopolitically natural resistance to the United States as the single superpower in some other parts of the world, given the United States’s normally selective approach to the use of the United Nations for its own interests or for collective interests, that, once 9/11 had happened, there was virtually universal sympathy for the United States in the United Nations. The symbols of that were the passing of two resolutions, 1368 and 1373. 1368 gave express cover for the United States to use military force in Afghanistan and 1373 set up a programme for all member states to take further measures to counter terrorism in their jurisdictions, with a sense of creating international law through a mandatory Security Council Resolution which was regarded by many UN member states as unprecedented up to that point. And yet not a single member of the Security Council argued about 1373 in any detail. Strangely, the one country on the Security Council that caused the United States trouble over 1373, and the United States was the drafter and promoter of that resolution in the Security Council — was the United Kingdom, because we had concerns about an asylum article in that resolution and that was a controversial topic in domestic UK politics at that time and I had instructions to question the wording at that point in the Security Council draft. No other member of the Security Council, as I recall, suggested drafting changes or substantive changes to the draft put down by the United States. I can’t think of another resolution that came before the Security Council in my time, proposed by the United States, that was not contested in some way or another by another member of the Security Council. The United States had sympathy. The attack on the Twin Towers and on Washington was going too far for everybody and that sympathy could have been extended, in my view, to other aspects of multilateral work at the UN and elsewhere, given its unusual character.
Legality and Legitimacy: In international law there is no Supreme Court. It is up to a nation state to make its own national decision as to whether to adhere to the judgments of the International Court of Justice or not. Iraq was not a treaty-based member of the International Court of Justice, so that didn’t come into it, probably, in our consideration of what we were doing with Iraq. But short of that, it is possible to have a firm legal opinion on the legality of action under the UN charter for a particular operation. But it is also possible for there to be many different legal opinions as to what is actually legal without having an apex arbiter of what is legal or what is not. So we are still in the position, even now in 2009, of having legal opinions out there that say that what we did in March 2003 was legal and what we did in March 2003 was illegal, and except as a matter of opinion, you can’t establish in law which of those two opinions are right finally and conclusively.
When you get to legitimacy, it is a very fair way of describing that if you have got broad opinion behind you, broad, reasonable opinion behind you, you are doing something that is defensible in a democratic environment. To some extent, the United Nations is a democratic environment. It is a forum of equal states equally signed up by treaty to the United Nations Charter, and each of those states have an opinion. If you do something internationally that the majority of UN member states think is wrong or illegitimate or politically unjustifiable, you are taking a risk in my view, and increasingly — and I think one of the lessons you may want to look at as an Inquiry is on the importance of legitimacy in geopolitical affairs nowadays. I regarded our invasion of Iraq — our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003 — as legal but of questionable legitimacy, in that it didn’t have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of member states or even perhaps of a majority of people inside the United Kingdom. So there was a failure to establish legitimacy, although I think we successfully established legality in the Security Council in the United Nations for both our actions in December 1998 and our actions in March 2003 to the degree at least that we were never challenged in the Security Council or in the International Court of Justice, for those actions.
France and the US: As far as national considerations were concerned … France … felt that it was not yet politically justifiable in international terms for the United States to use force at this juncture with the inspectors on the ground still doing their work, believing, as they did, as President Chirac and others frequently said, that war was an awful thing and should be avoided at all costs unless it was absolutely necessary. As I said, and as others will no doubt tell you, France had intimated to us at various points earlier in this saga that they might join a military campaign if there was unequivocal proof, evidence, that Iraq possessed WMD and was lying through its teeth all along. So there were national considerations and there were international considerations in Paris and Moscow in particular, and there was this view that the United States just was hell bent on the use of force anyway and was not respecting the procedures of the United Nations. At some point, whether you want me to answer this now or later, I think it is important that I say to this Inquiry what I think the results were of the UK’s own national efforts at the United Nations to go the last mile to find a way of doing this without the use of force, because I think they were relevant to the further diplomacy on Iraq during and after the invasion.
The consequences of this whole argument about specific decision-making was that France, in particular, in the UK view, abandoned the agreement that we had had on the compromise in 1441, became so determined to stop unilateral action by the United States, that it insisted on a specific decision of the Security Council as a policy position of France when that was not backed up by the negotiating history of 1441. So there was a movement in French policy away from the basis of compromise of 1441.
Throughout Sir Jeremy’s testimony, one thing was clear. It was already in the lines from the leaked Downing Street Memo from the year before:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.23 July 2002
The contempt for the UN by the Bush Administration was felt by all concerned. The UN saw that we were trying to get them to sign off on a military intervention already in progress. Had we been negotiating in good faith [meaning determined to find out if Iraq had WMD], the UN would have gone the distance to answer that question. The Security Council could see we were not respecting the UN procedures and became increasingly focused on our pugilism rather than the real matter at hand – Iraq’s dangerousness. We were the problem to be dealt with. The UK’s problem was that their Prime Minister was in cahoots with our President. Bush and Blair weren’t after WMD – they wanted a regime change in Iraq. Neither Powell nor Greenstock could gain traction with the UN because our arguments were transparently deceitful [and, by the way, dead wrong]. Iraq didn’t have any WMD. So there was, in fact, neither danger nor cause for urgency. The UN process would’ve proved that, but our ulterior motives got in the way.
Greenstock’s Final Thoughts: There are all sorts of areas, Chairman, in which we haven’t had a conversation and you haven’t yet had with your other witnesses. The role of Israel in this whole saga, the role of Iran in this whole saga, the psychology of Saddam Hussein, not particularly for this witness to get into, but the complexity of the picture: why did Saddam continue to pretend he had WMD when he didn’t, when it was going to mean the collapse of his regime, these are questions you are going to examine. But it was behind the thinking of much of the things that we did in the Security Council and in the discussions that I was having with my fellow permanent members. We were covering the whole area of discussion about what all this meant in its various aspects. Within all those discussions, there wasn’t a single member of the Security Council, or indeed of the United Nations, that I had could identify, besides Iraq, that was speaking up for the Government of Iraq. Everybody felt that Iraq was contravening the resolutions of the United Nations.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.