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| Blair's crime of hubris | Jonathan Steele Blair's boast about WMD points to a fertile new field of inquiry that Chilcot must not duckTony Blair's boast that he would have sought to remove Saddam Hussein even if he knew Iraq's president no longer had weapons of mass destruction brings fresh evidence that he probably committed a crime in going along with George Bush's invasion. It also puts the spotlight on Gordon Brown, David Miliband and the rest of the Labour cabinet of the time.Perhaps that was the purpose behind the former prime minister's extraordinary claim in his BBC interview with Fern Britton yesterday. Perhaps he wants to bring his colleagues down with him, for the nub of Blair's new case is that he could have persuaded the cabinet to go to war even if there were no Iraqi WMD. "You would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat", as he put it with his customary arrogance. Could he have succeeded? Would the cabinet really have been so weak that they dared not resist? The challenge to the Chilcot inquiry is to invite Blair's senior ministers to come before it and answer the same question: would you have gone along with an invasion, even if you knew Iraq was disarmed?It is hard to see how there could have been any legal basis for an invasion if Saddam had been shown to have disarmed. UN security council resolution 678, dating back to 1990, on which the attorney general flimsily relied for his eve-of-war advice to Blair that the war was legal, justifies force only in the case that Saddam was not complying with demands that he disarm. Once it became clear Iraq no longer had WMD, resolution 678 falls away.Apart from WMD there was no other conceivable foundation for an invasion. Using force to produce regime change on humanitarian grounds is not permissible under international law, and the attorney general told Blair as much in July 2002. Nor is there any way that the security council would have authorised it later on that year or in 2003.Yet Blair in effect admits he and Bush planned to launch a war even if they knew there was no chance of getting UN approval. In cases brought before the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, political leaders who plotted large-scale illegal violence were described as collaborating in a "joint criminal enterprise". Here too is a fertile new field of inquiry that Chilcot must not duck.Blair claims Saddam was a dictator with an atrocious human rights record and this was enough to want to remove him from being "a threat to the region". In addition to its illegality, this argument begs the "Why now?" question that opponents of the war raised in 2003. A White House fact sheet published in April 2003 recalled that Saddam's greatest killing took place in the 1980s (when he was an ally of the west). Hundreds of thousands died. By the end of the 1990s, according to Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, the annual death toll in his prisons and torture cells was in the hundreds. Grim though this still was, why the sudden urgency to stop it?As for Blair's claim that the invasion was justified because Iraq is better off without Saddam and his vile sons, he would do better to consult Iraqis rather than rely on his blind judgment that he did what was right. They are the ones whose country has been plunged into chaos and destruction thanks to Bush and Blair, with millions made homeless and countless thousands dead. The latest of the regular polls of Iraqis, done for the BBC, ABC News and Japan's NHK in February this year, found 56% thought the invasion was wrong.Blair made singularly little effort to open his mind to reliable facts before the invasion, either on intelligence about WMD or on the nature of Iraqi society and the consequences of a western invasion. He should have the humility to do some homework now.Iraq war inquiryIraqTony BlairJonathan Steeleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Thailand Set to Repatriate Lao Hmong Despite Concerns of Political Persecution Many Hmong fought with the United States against communist forces during the Vietnam War and say Lao government has discriminated against their families ever since. www1.voanews.com |
Underpowered? How Formula 1 is faring after the downturn news.bbc.co.uk |
South Africa Sends Search, Rescue Teams to Haiti Local civic group sends first of several teams to help victims of earthquake and hopefully save some lives www1.voanews.com |
Lashing, prison ordered for Saudi teen RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) -- A teenage girl has been sentenced to a 90-lash flogging and two months in prison as punishment for assaulting a teacher, a Saudi judge said in an interview published Sunday.... hosted.ap.org |