Last Straw

Alasdair Palmer of Lord Tubby’s newspaper has this to say:

Lord Goldsmith’s confidential advice to the Prime Minister on the legality of invading Iraq without a second UN resolution, revealed for the first time last week, was equivocal about almost everything. It was clear about one point and one point only: “Regime change,” insisted the Attorney General, “cannot be the object of military action.” Any invasion which had that goal would be unambiguously illegal under international law.

Last week, most of the discussion of the Attorney General’s advice centred on whether it was “arguable” that the invasion would be legal without a second UN resolution explicitly authorising it. Yet when compared with the glaring illegality of an invasion whose explicit purpose was regime change, this is a non-issue. The Prime Minister knew it, the Attorney General knew it, the Cabinet knew it, and so did anyone who bothered to think about it. What, then, was Tony Blair doing when he stated: “What is important is that whatever action we take is done in accordance with international law”?

The repeated insistence of the Prime Minister, the Attorney General and, indeed, the whole Cabinet, that the invasion of Iraq was compatible with international law seems simply to have been a pose to try to fool people who genuinely wanted the invasion to be legal - but were too stupid to see for themselves that it wasn’t.

Of course, a number of the people in that category include the Labour MPs who voted for it after hearing the Prime Minister and the Attorney General assure them that it was in line with what international law required. Many of those MPs are now very angry at their own stupidity. They have deflected their anger on to the Prime Minister and the Attorney General for not sharing the confidential advice that was released last week.

This is simply a further demonstration of their own idiocy, for there was nothing in that confidential advice that was not obvious at the time of the Commons vote. It was extremely easy to work out that the invasion was incompatible with international law. If that law has a guiding principle, it is that the invasion of one country by another in order to replace its ruler is a flagrant violation of state sovereignty.

I do not believe that the Prime Minister cynically exploited his MPs’ stupidity by his pretence: the first person he fooled by his sophistry was himself. A self-deluding sophist is not an ideal character to have as the leader of our country: it is what we will get if we re-elect Tony Blair and Labour next week.

It’s worth reading the whole piece: Regime change is illegal: end of debate to say.

Michael Smith of the Sunday Times points out that:

The minutes show Goldsmith warned Blair eight months before war started on March 19, 2003 that finding legal justification would be “difficult”. The attorney-general only ruled unambiguously war was lawful a few days before the war started after Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the defence staff, demanded unequivocal written confirmation.

Boyce was never shown Goldsmith’s more equivocal advice to Blair of March 7, 2003, and says today ministers failed to give him protection from prosecution at the International Criminal Court. “I have always been troubled by the ICC,” he says, adding that if British servicemen are put on trial, ministers should be “brought into the frame as well”. Asked if that should include Blair and Goldsmith, he tells The Observer: “Too bloody right.”

Too bloody right.

Sir Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said the leaked minute showed Blair had “agreed to an illegal regime change with the Bush administration. It set out to create the justification for going to war. It was to be war by any means.”

Suggestion for next week’s headline, “Britain re-elects War Criminal!”