- The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared
that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony
Blair.
-
- Mr Blix, speaking to The Independent, said the Attorney
General's legal advice to the Government on the eve of war, giving cover
for military action by the US and Britain, had no lawful justification.
He said it would have required a second United Nations resolution explicitly
authorising the use of force for the invasion of Iraq last March to have
been legal.
-
- His intervention goes to the heart of the current controversy
over Lord Goldsmith's advice, and comes as the Prime Minister begins his
fightback with a speech on Iraq today.
-
- An unrepentant Mr Blair will refuse to apologise for
the war in Iraq, insisting the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein
in power. He will point to the wider benefits of the Iraq conflict, citing
Libya's decision to give up its weapons of mass destruction, but warn that
the world cannot turn a blind eye to the continuing threat from WMD.
-
- But, in an exclusive interview, Mr Blix said: "I
don't buy the argument the war was legalised by the Iraqi violation of
earlier resolutions."
-
- And it appeared yesterday that the Government shared
that view until the eve of war, when it received the Lord Goldsmith's final
advice.
-
- Sir Andrew Turnbull, the Cabinet Secretary, revealed
that the Government had assumed, until the eve of war in Iraq, that it
needed a specific UN mandate to authorise military action.
-
- Mr Blix demolished the argument advanced by Lord Goldsmith
three days before the war began, which stated that resolution 1441 authorised
the use of force because it revived earlier UN resolutions passed after
the 1991 ceasefire.
-
- Mr Blix said that while it was possible to argue that
Iraq had breached the ceasefire by violating UN resolutions adopted since
1991, the "ownership" of the resolutions rested with the entire
15-member Security Council and not with individual states. "It's the
Security Council that is party to the ceasefire, not the UK and US individually,
and therefore it is the council that has ownership of the ceasefire, in
my interpretation."
-
- He said to challenge that interpretation would set a
dangerous precedent. "Any individual member could take a view - the
Russians could take one view, the Chinese could take another, they could
be at war with each other, theoretically," Mr Blix said.
-
- The Attorney General's opinion has come under fresh scrutiny
since the collapse of the trial against the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine
Gun last week, prompting calls for his full advice to be made public.
-
- Mr Blix, who is an international lawyer by training,
said: "I would suspect there is a more sceptical view than those two
A4 pages," in a reference to Clare Short's contemptuous description
of the 358-word summary.
-
- It emerged on Wednesday that a Foreign Office memo, sent
to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the same day that Lord Goldsmith's
summary was published, made clear that there was no "automaticity"
in resolution 1441 to justify war.
-
- Asked whether, in his view, a second resolution authorising
force should have been adopted, Mr Blix replied: "Oh yes."
-
- In the interview, ahead of the publication next week
of his book Disarming Iraq: The search for weapons of mass destruction,
Mr Blix dismissed the suggestion that Mr Blair should resign or apologise
over the failure to find any WMD in Iraq.
-
- But he suggested that the Prime Minister may have been
fatally wounded by his loss of credibility, and that voters would deliver
their verdict. "Some people say Bush and Blair should be put before
a tribunal and I say that you have the punishment in the political field
here," he said. "Their credibility has been affected by this:
Bush too lost some credibility."
-
- He repeated accusations the US and British governments
were "hyped" intelligence and lacking critical thinking. "They
used exclamation marks instead of question marks."
-
- "I have some understanding for that. Politicians
have to simplify to explain, they also have to act in this world before
they have 100 per cent evidence. But I think they went further."
-
- "But I never said they had acted in bad faith,"
he added. "Perhaps it was worse that they acted out of good faith."
-
- The threat allegedly posed by Saddam's WMD was the prime
reason cited by the British government for going to war. But not a single
item of banned weaponry has been found in the 11 months that have followed
the declared end of hostilities.
-
- Mr Blair will argue that similar decisive action will
need to be taken in future to combat the threat of rogue states and terrorists
obtaining WMD.
-
- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
-
- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=498039
|
