{"id":4381,"date":"2010-10-02T13:14:54","date_gmt":"2010-10-02T17:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=4381"},"modified":"2010-11-16T19:37:37","modified_gmt":"2010-11-16T23:37:37","slug":"what-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2010\/10\/02\/what-war\/","title":{"rendered":"what war?…"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Blair’s case for Iraq invasion was self-serving, lawyers tell Chilcot inquiry<\/a>
guardian.co.uk<\/strong><\/div>\n
by Richard Norton-Taylor
30 September 2010<\/div>\n

The Blair government undermined the UN, bowed to US political pressure and relied on self-serving arguments to justify its decision to invade Iraq, according to evidence to the Chilcot inquiry by international lawyers. A key theme of the evidence, yet to be published, is that the government weakened the UN, damaging the country’s reputation in the process – arguments made by Ed Miliband in his inaugural speech to the Labour conference.<\/sup><\/p>\n

Ralph Zacklin, the British-born UN assistant secretary general for legal affairs at the time, has told the inquiry that the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, failed to strike a proper balance "between the underlying political concerns of the government and respect for the rule of law" in adopting the view that a fresh UN security council resolution was not needed. Goldsmith’s interpretation of previous UN resolutions was "self-serving". "The damage to the UK and credibility of the security council was very significant", he told the Guardian today. "It was pretty clear [Goldsmith] was under a lot of pressure".<\/sup><\/p>\n

Zacklin said the way Jack Straw, then foreign secretary, dismissed the advice of his own lawyers was particularly shocking. Chilcot has heard that Sir Michael Wood, warned Straw that "to use force without security council authority would amount to a crime of aggression". In a separate submission, a group of 23 lawyers describe the government’s argument that it could rely on previous UN resolutions to invade as untenable. "The decision to use force against a sovereign state is so monumental … it can only be taken by the security council."<\/sup><\/p>\n

The submission, drawn up by Dapo Akande, lecturer in public international law at Oxford University and more than 20 others, points to the British government’s argument that the last pre-invasion UN resolution – number 1441 – was enough to trigger military force because otherwise the US would not have agreed to it. That argument is "logically flawed", they say. "By relying so heavily on the views of the US negotiators … Lord Goldsmith shifted his perspective from the UK … argument to the US one." They describe the government’s view as an "untenable interpretation of the UN charter which would have destabilising effects for the UN collective security system".<\/sup><\/p>\n

Philippe Sands QC, a barrister at Matrix chambers and professor of international law at University College London, refers to Goldsmith’s final decision to back an invasion – wrongly described by Blair as a formal legal "opinion", Sands says – as "an advocacy piece written by committee". He told the inquiry: "Parliament, the cabinet, and the public were misled. It seems the law (or legal advice) was fixed around the policy as determined by the prime minister without taking account of legal advice."<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/p>\n
The inquiry has received more than 30 responses to its request for submissions from international lawyers, although it is not clear when they will be published and in what form.<\/sup><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Watching the Chilcot Inquiry<\/font><\/strong>, there was little question that the Blair\/Straw\/Goldsmith triumvirate rubber-sheeted British and International Law to justify invading Iraq in 2003. At least they did it in public. At least their government reviewed the decision. At least the Chilcot Inquiry will document what happened for the future.<\/div>\n
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In our case, the principals are all but forgotten [along with the principles]. When was the last time these guys were mentioned in the daily news? Well Bush and Cheney are speaking at an upcoming Insurance Meeting<\/strong><\/a> in Colorado Springs and John Yoo is on a panel in Minneapolis<\/strong><\/a> next week. That’s about it. At this rate, I’m not sure the Iraq War will even be mentioned in the future, just a negative space in our history, like Ground Zero in New York City – an absence<\/em>.<\/div>\n

And as for American and International Laws, we didn’t seem to be even thinking about those things back then. By declaring war on an feeling [terror] rather than against anything specific [al Qaeda, Afghanistan, etc], our leaders claimed to gain war powers to suspend our laws, war powers that justified going to war, which gave them war powers. It all seems like a bad dream, yet the dispair lives on focused on the government we have now instead of the one that got us here. I guess if you declare a war on an emotion [terror], what you win is another emotion [disillusionment]. We didn’t defeat Terror, we just widened the scope of what we’re afraid of. <\/p>\n

One of the most ludicrous remnants of this hole in our history is that the Tea Party  – fighting against being taxed to pay for a war that’s already been fought and paid for with other countries’ money. That’s the essence of the thing. We didn’t pay for the war while we fought it. Instead, we simply tagged it onto the national debt. Now, they want to pay down the national debt by cutting taxes<\/em>? And they blame the national debt escalation on the political party that’s trying to put us back together in the aftermath of the administration caused the debt in the first place? And in all the theatrics around the financial mess, they skip the central causative history – the invasion of Iraq and the War on Terror.<\/div>\n
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    …the British government’s argument that the last pre-invasion UN resolution – number 1441 – was enough to trigger military force because otherwise the US would not have agreed to it. That argument is "logically flawed", they say. "By relying so heavily on the views of the US negotiators … Lord Goldsmith shifted his perspective from the UK … argument to the US one." <\/em><\/div>\n<\/ul>\n
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    In England, the Chilcot Inquiry<\/font><\/strong> has been criticized for being too soft. It’s hard for me to understand that criticism from this side of the Atlantic. They are acknowledging that the Invasion of Iraq occurred for starters. They’ve held public hearings in which what happened has been made perfectly clear and we’ve heard from the people who made the decisions. If they’ve been too soft, it’s that they’ve been too soft on the U.S. – not themselves. We’ve done nothing of the sort and are currently conducting our political business as if the whole damnable thing didn’t even happen. The UK’s main sin was in following our lead. I wonder how they feel about our treating the whole thing as a black hole?…<\/div>\n

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    Blair’s case for Iraq invasion was self-serving, lawyers tell Chilcot inquiry guardian.co.uk by Richard Norton-Taylor 30 September 2010 The Blair government undermined the UN, bowed to US political pressure and relied on self-serving arguments to justify its decision to invade Iraq, according to evidence to the Chilcot inquiry by international lawyers. A key theme of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}