Secret UK pre-war legal memo

Blair minions secretly were concerned about legality of Iraq conquest


Eager for war -- will there be politcal consequences for his Bush embrace?


US tank rushing into Iraq, March 2003

For a couple of months now, discussion in the UK has been swirling about the evolution of official pre-war legal opinions and who in the Blair government was allowed to read them. Today, the full legal advice prepared by the UK's Lord Goldsmith was released to the public.

Now we know why only a tight-knit group close to Blair had been privy to the full scope of the advice -- advice on whether or not the then coming attack on Iraq, without a directly-enabling Security Council resolution, would be an illegal war of aggression. The reason the true advice in the now-revealed memo was hushed is that Blair lied through his teeth on March 18, 2003 when he reported a motion in the House of Commons that without equivocation noted

the opinion of the Attorney General that, Iraq having failed to comply and Iraq being at the time of Resolution 1441 and continuing to be in material breach, the authority to use force under Resolution 678 has revived and so continues today; believes that the United Kingdom must uphold the authority of the United Nations as set out in Resolution 1441 and many Resolutions preceding it, and therefore supports the decision of Her Majesty's Government that the United Kingdom should use all means necessary to ensure the disarmament of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction...

But in the now-public document, ``It appears the attorney general did not give a clear and unequivocal opinion. We were led to believe that he gave such an opinion because one person stood up in each house of parliament and said so. We have been chasing a chimera all this time,'' according to Jeremy Carver, a leading international lawyer and board member of Transparency International UK, who was quoted in The Guardian today.

The kicker, in my opinion, is that evidently behind the scenes at the time, Lord Goldsmith had totally rejected that the war could be legal because Iraq posed an imminent threat, justifying self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter. Officially, only convoluted logic -- of UNSCR 1441 ``reviving'' some kind of automatic right of the US and the UK to enforce post-Gulf-War I Resolution 678 -- separates the actions of the countries from those of the Nazis and the supreme crime of aggression.

But when United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 passed on November 8, 2002, no one except the US and the UK suggested that it contained such an outlandish legal theory. In fact, other member of the Council thought quite the opposite was true -- that war could not be ``automatic'' without further action of the Council.

Evidently UNSCR 1441 was designed by it's US promoters to buffalo reluctant member states into thinking they were going to have some say in whether or not the US would be allowed to take Iraq. The United States not only broke this promise inherent in UNSCR 1441 -- that it would receive from the Security Council definition of ``serious consequences'' for ``material breach'' and definite authorization for any violence it would commit in Iraq -- it has worn the tatters of international law that it shredded ever since.

The proof in the pudding, of course, is that there were no weapons in Iraq to trigger backwards in time to UNSCR 678 the ``serious consequence'' of war. And this was indicated at the time by the UNMOVIC inspectors, who on the very day Lord Goldsmith was issuing the secret memo -- March 7, 2003 -- were busily kicking huge bricks out of the US posture now symbolized by the swindle Former Secretary of State Powell gave to the Security Council the previous month. Deep Blade issued a piece about all this on March 12 of that year:

Then on March 7, Hans Blix threw more of Powell’s case out the window: ``Intelligence authorities have claimed that weapons of mass destruction are moved around Iraq by trucks. In particular, that there are mobile production units for biological weapons. The Iraqi side states that such activities do not exist. Several inspections have taken place at declared and undeclared sites in relation to mobile production facilities. Food testing mobile laboratories and mobile workshops have been seen, as well as large containers with seed processing equipment. No evidence of proscribed activities has so far been found''....

...ElBaradei reported on March 7 that his agency had determined that documents said by the United States and Britain to support the allegations, and trumpeted during the fall of 2002 by Bush and Blair, were fraudulent, ``Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that these documents — which formed the basis for the reports of these uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger — are, in fact, not authentic,'' he said.

So it was clearly evident at the time that there was no ``material breach'', and it sure is clear now -- given the last inspector's null findings (really, really null findings, as reported just two days ago).

By the logic in official memos, then, the Iraq invasion was a war of aggression. It is not considered as such -- yet -- no matter how many war crimes the aggressors have subsequently committed. The power relationships in the world are such that the arrogant governments led by Bush and Blair have had their way and continue to. It will be for seekers of justice perhaps decades from now to attempt to right these wrongs.