The British government’s grovelling apology to Israel after an arrest warrant was issued against former foreign minister Tzipi Livni was compounded by its promise to change the law to allow war criminals to roam freely.
Livni was up to her neck in the mass slaughter perpetrated against Palestinians in Gaza and declares her pride in all her decisions taken with regard to Operation Cast Lead.
| By Daud Abdullah, Al Jazeera, Dec 18, 2009
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David Miliband, the UK’s foreign secretary, has apologised to his Israeli counterpart, Avigdor Lieberman, after the humiliation and embarrassment caused by the issuing of a warrant for the arrest of Tzipi Livni, the former Israeli foreign minister.The arrest warrant was issued over Livni’s suspected war crimes role during Israel’s war on Gaza, but was later withdrawn after she cancelled her visit to London. Miliband also promised to begin work immediately to change UK laws to ensure that no such warrants would be issued for Israeli officials in the future. As an added sweetener to the act of contrition, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, also personally called Livni to assure her she would always be welcomed to visit the UK. All of this is easier said than done. Already there is a huge outcry in Britain over the mere thought of changing UK laws or reneging on treaty obligations simply to protect Israeli officials involved in the serial breach of international law. In their deluded fantasy the Israelis claim that the judicial order in London will seriously impair bi-lateral relations between London and Tel Aviv, jeopardise the Middle East peace process and undermine Britain’s image in the region. Historic Middle East role
What a gross distortion. Britain’s historic relationship and role in the Middle East is unquestioned. Even though it has on many occasions acted against the national interests of the people of the region and the Palestinians in particular, it would be wishful thinking to suggest that it could be excluded from future negotiations.Instead of being eternally grateful to Britain for creating their state in Palestine, Israeli officials are today attempting to bite the very hand that fed them. To claim that Britain is in trouble or would be the loser because of the court order is disingenuous. Actually, the only losers are those who planned, commissioned and executed the war crimes committed in the Gaza Strip. They are the ones in hot water, so to speak, and the greatest service Brown could make on behalf of universal jurisdiction is to leave them to stew in it. These sentiments were expressed by his former cabinet colleague Clare Short, a member of the Labour Party and an independent MP, while addressing a conference organised by the Palestinian Return Centre, in London. A former minister for international development, Short said the crimes committed in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead last year marked a defining moment in the conflict. She criticised how Israel has undermined the international system by its cavalier breach of conventions and established norms in an apparent attempt to tell the world that there are special laws for certain states and that it is a state above the law. She derided the hypocrisy of those who seek to prosecute Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president, while at the same time they refuse and obstruct efforts to investigated and prosecute Israeli criminals. Violations of international law The groveling apology to Israel, after the British ambassador was summoned for a reprimand by the Israeli foreign ministry, is the type of reaction expected from a banana republic, not from Great Britain. Should the foreign secretary entertain Lieberman, a Jewish settler himself and a resident of Nokdim, a West Bank settlement considered illegal under international law? What a contradiction. The official policy of the UK government is that all settlements in the lands occupied in 1967 are illegal and violate UN Security Council resolutions and the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is poignant to point out that Livni’s father and mother were regarded as “terrorists” by the British Mandate authorities in Palestine in the 1940s and were both captured and locked up. Under Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, Britain still has an obligation to “to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts”. What is at stake in this imbroglio is the independence of the British judiciary, an institution that for hundreds of years has been a source of national pride and emulated by many nations. It is for this reason there is anger and outrage over the government’s declared intent to succumb to Israel. The implication, of course, is the fear that in future Britain would not be able to lay any claim to be a bastion and guardian of international law. The rhetoric of ‘rule of law’ will run hollow if there was any change of the law for no other reason except to protect war criminals who happen to be members of the club. Compelling evidence
It must be recalled that these laws came into being because of the Nazi war crimes and crimes against humanity. Only last month there was great satisfaction and hubris when John Demjanjuk was brought before a German court more than 60 years after allegedly committing his crimes.The message was clear: that war crimes and crimes against humanity are so repugnant that they must not go unpunished. The case against the Israeli minister and her accomplices was made not by Richard Goldstone only. A number of independent reports including the report of Independent Fact-Finding Committee on Gaza to the Arab League, the Martin Commission report to the UN secretary-general on attacks on UN premises, and reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights and the National Lawyers Guild, all support the conclusion that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by the Israeli military in its Operation Cast Lead. It was because of this compelling evidence that a British judge issued the warrant for Livni’s arrest. To present the matter as if it were a malicious witch hunt is simply beside the point. Surely it would be a travesty of justice if what occurred in Gaza was not investigated and prosecuted. Peace in the region has remained elusive precisely because of this failure to be even-handed in the application of international law, always at the expense of Palestinian rights. If Palestinians do not have recourse to the law, one wonders what other options are left to them when their legitimate grievances are ignored. Daud Abdullah is the director of the Middle East Monitor, an independent media research institution founded in the United Kingdom to foster a fair and accurate coverage in the Western media of Middle Eastern issues and in particular the Palestine Question. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy. |
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media
John Pilger, New Statesman, Dec 10, 2009
I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day, only to learn that he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.
“Everyone knows,” he said, “except parliament and the public.”
“And the media?”
“The media – the big names – have been invited to King Charles Street [the Foreign Office] and flattered and briefed with lies. They are no trouble.”
As Iraq desk officer at the Foreign Office, he had drafted letters for ministers reassuring MPs and the public that the government was not arming Saddam Hussein. “This was a downright lie,” he said. “I couldn’t bear it.”
Giving evidence before the arms-to-Iraq inquiry, Higson was the only British official commended by Lord Justice Scott for telling the truth. The price he paid was the loss of his health and marriage, and constant surveillance by spooks. He ended up living on benefits in a Birmingham bedsit where he suffered a seizure, struck his head and died alone. Whistleblowers are often heroes; he was one.
He came to mind when I saw a picture in the paper of another Foreign Office official, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, who was Tony Blair’s ambassador to the United Nations in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was Sir Jeremy, more than anyone else, who tried every trick to find a UN cover for the bloodbath to come. Indeed, this was his boast on 27 November to the Chilcot inquiry, where he described the invasion as “legal but of questionable legitimacy”. How clever. In the picture he wore a smirk.
Under international law, “questionable legitimacy” does not exist. An attack on a sovereign state is a crime. This was made clear by Britain’s chief law officer and attorney general, Peter Goldsmith, before his arm was twisted, and by the Foreign Office’s own legal advisers, and subsequently by the UN secretary general. The invasion of Iraq is the crime of the 21st century. During 17 years of assault on a defenceless civilian population, veiled with weasel monikers such as “sanctions” and “no-fly zones” and “building democracy”, more people have died in Iraq than at the height of the slave trade. Set that against Sir Jeremy’s skin-saving revisionism about American “noises” that were “decidedly unhelpful to what I was trying to do [at the UN] in New York”. Moreover, “I myself warned the Foreign Office . . . that I might have to consider my own position . . .”
It wasn’t me, guv.
The purpose of the Chilcot inquiry is to normalise an epic crime by providing enough of a theatre of guilt to satisfy the media, so that the only issue which matters, that of prosecution, is never raised. When he appears in January, Blair will play this part to odious perfection, dutifully absorbing the hisses and boos. All “inquiries” into state crimes are neutered in this way. In 1996, Lord Justice Scott’s arms-to-Iraq report obfuscated the crimes his investigations and voluminous evidence had revealed.
At that time, I interviewed Tim Laxton, who had attended the inquiry every day as an auditor of companies taken over by MI6 and other secret agencies as vehicles for the illegal arms trade with Saddam. Had there been a full and open criminal investigation, Laxton told me, “hundreds” would have faced prosecution. “They would include,” he said, “top political figures, very senior civil servants throughout Whitehall . . . the top echelon of government.”
That is why Chilcot is advised by the likes of Sir Martin Gilbert, who once compared Blair with Churchill and Roosevelt. That is why the inquiry will not demand the release of documents that would illuminate the role of the entire Blair gang, notably the 2003 cabinet, long silent. Who remembers the threat of the thuggish Geoff Hoon, Blair’s “defence secretary”, to use nuclear weapons against Iraq?
In February, Jack Straw, one of Blair’s principal accomplices, the current “justice secretary” and the man who let the mass murderer General Pinochet escape justice, overruled the Information Commissioner, who had ordered the government to publish cabinet minutes from the period when Lord Goldsmith was pressured into changing his judgment that the invasion was illegal. How they all fear exposure.
The media have granted themselves immunity. On 27 November, Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector, wrote that the invasion “was made far easier given the role of useful idiot played by much of the mainstream media in the US and Britain”. More than four years before the invasion, Ritter, in interviews with myself and others, left not a shred of doubt that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction had been disabled, yet he was made a non-person. In 2002, when the Bush/Blair lies were in full echo across the media, the Guardian and Observer mentioned Iraq in more than 3,000 articles, of which only 49 referred to Ritter and his truth.
What has changed? On 30 November, the Independent published a pristine piece of propaganda from its embedded man in Afghanistan. “Troops fear defeat at home”, said the headline. Britain, said the report, “is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralising the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned”. In fact, public disgust with the disaster in Afghanistan is mirrored among many serving troops and their families; and this frightens the warmongers. So “defeatism” and “demoralising the troops” are added to the weasel lexicon. Good try. Unfortunately, like Iraq, Afghanistan is a crime. Period.
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By John Pilger, Information Clearing House, Dec 9, 2009
I tried to contact Mark Higson the other day only to learn he had died nine years ago. He was just 40, an honourable man. We met soon after he had resigned from the Foreign Office in 1991 and I asked him if the government knew that Hawk fighter-bombers sold to Indonesia were being used against civilians in East Timor.
If Barack Obama heralds an escalation of the war, he will betray his own message of hope and deepen my people’s pain
Malalai Joya, The Guardian/UK, Nov 30, 2009
After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country.
I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week’s announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.
Already this year we have seen the impact of an increase in troops occupying Afghanistan: more violence, and more civilian deaths. My people, the poor of Afghanistan who have known only war and the domination of fundamentalism, are today squashed between two enemies: the US/Nato occupation forces on one hand and warlords and the Taliban on the other.
While we want the withdrawal of one enemy, we don’t believe it is a matter of choosing between two evils. There is an alternative: the democratic-minded parties and intellectuals are our hope for the future of Afghanistan.
It will not be easy, but if we have a little bit of peace we will be better able to fight our own internal enemies – Afghans know what to do with our destiny. We are not a backward people, and we are capable of fighting for democracy, human and women’s rights in Afghanistan. In fact the only way these values will be achieved is if we struggle for them and win them ourselves.
After eight years of war, the situation is as bad as ever for ordinary Afghans, and women in particular. The reality is that only the drug traffickers and warlords have been helped under this corrupt and illegitimate Karzai government. Karzai’s promises of reform are laughable. His own vice-president is the notorious warlord Fahim, whom Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch describes as “one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands”.
Transparency International reports that this regime is the second most corrupt in the world. The UN Development Programme reports Afghanistan is second last – 181st out of 182 countries – in terms of human development. That is why we no longer want this kind of “help” from the west.
Like many around the world, I am wondering what kind of “peace” prize can be awarded to a leader who continues the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and starts a new war in Pakistan, all while supporting Israel?
Throughout my recent tour of the US, I had the chance to meet many military families and veterans who are working to put an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand that it is not a case of a “bad war” and a “good war” – there is no difference, war is war.
Members of Iraq Veterans Against War even accompanied me to meet members of Congress in Washington DC. Together we tried to explain the terrible human cost of this war, in terms of Afghan, US and Nato lives. Unfortunately, only a few representatives really offered their support to our struggle for peace.
While the government was not responsive, the people of the US did offer me their support. And polls confirm that the US public wants peace, not an escalated war. Many also want Obama to hold Bush and his administration to account for war crimes. Everywhere I spoke, people responded strongly when I said that if Obama really wanted peace he would first of all try to prosecute Bush and have him tried before the international criminal court. Replacing Bush’s man in the Pentagon, Robert Gates, would have been a good start – but Obama chose not to.
Unfortunately, the UK government shamefully follows the path of the US in Afghanistan. Even though opinion polls show that more than 70% of the population is against the war, Gordon Brown has announced the deployment of more UK troops. It is sad that more taxpayers’ money will be wasted on this war, while Britain’s poor continue to suffer from a lack of basic services.
The UK government has also tried to silence dissent, for instance by arresting Joe Glenton, a British soldier who has refused to return to Afghanistan. I had a chance to meet Glenton when I was in London last summer, and together we spoke out against the war. My message to him is that, in times of great injustice, it is sometimes better to go to jail than be part of committing war crimes.
Facing a difficult choice, Glenton made a courageous decision, while Obama and Brown have chosen to follow the Bush administration. Instead of hope and change, in foreign policy Obama is delivering more of the same. But I still have hope because, as our history teaches, the people of Afghanistan will never accept occupation.
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| There is a danger that Australia could become a safe haven for Israeli war criminals. |
By Sonja Karkar, The Palestine Chronicle, Nov 29, 2009
The news that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was in Australia and was welcomed by the honourable members of our parliament came as somewhat of a shock. It is one thing to have allowed a man on corruption charges as well as facing war crimes indictments into Australia at all; it is another thing that he was listed as a distinguished guest in Hansard – the official record of parliamentary proceedings – and received a resounding “hear, hear” from our elected representatives.
By Simon Walters, Mail on Sunday Political Editor
Mail Online/UK, 29th November 2009
Resolve: Blair and Bush in April 2002, when they secretly agreed on ‘regime change’ in Iraq
An explosive secret letter that exposes how Tony Blair lied over the legality of the Iraq War can be revealed.
The Chilcot Inquiry into the war will interrogate the former Prime Minister over the devastating ‘smoking gun’ memo, which warned him in the starkest terms the war was illegal.
The Mail on Sunday can disclose that Attorney General Lord Goldsmith wrote the letter to Mr Blair in July 2002 – a full eight months before the war – telling him that deposing Saddam Hussein was a blatant breach of international law.
It was intended to make Mr Blair call off the invasion, but he ignored it. Instead, a panicking Mr Blair issued instructions to gag Lord Goldsmith, banned him from attending Cabinet meetings and ordered a cover-up to stop the public finding out.
He even concealed the bombshell information from his own Cabinet, fearing it would spark an anti-war revolt. The only people he told were a handful of cronies who were sworn to secrecy.
Lord Goldsmith was so furious at his treatment he threatened to resign – and lost three stone as Mr Blair and his cronies bullied him into backing down.
Sources close to the peer say he was ‘more or less pinned to the wall’ in a Downing Street showdown with two of Mr Blair’s most loyal aides, Lord Falconer and Baroness Morgan.
The revelations follow a series of testimonies by key figures at the Chilcot Inquiry who have questioned Mr Blair’s judgment and honesty, and the legality of the war.
The Mail on Sunday has learned that the inquiry has been given Lord Goldsmith’s explosive letter, and that Mr Blair and the peer are likely to be interrogated about it when they give evidence in the New Year.
Lord Goldsmith gave qualified legal backing to the conflict days before the war broke out in March 2003 in a brief, carefully drafted statement. As The Mail on Sunday disclosed three years ago, even that was a distortion as Lord Goldsmith had told Mr Blair a week earlier he could be breaking international law.
But today’s revelations show that Lord Goldsmith told Mr Blair at the outset, and in writing, that military action against Iraq was totally illegal.
Pressured: Lord Goldsmith leaves No10 in March 2003 after talks with Blair
The disclosures deal a massive blow to Mr Blair’s hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and George Bush declared war on Iraq. And they are likely to fuel further calls for Mr Blair to be charged with war crimes.
Lord Goldsmith’s ‘smoking gun’ letter came six days after a Cabinet meeting on July 23, 2002, at which Ministers were secretly told that the US and UK were set on ‘regime change’ in Iraq.
The peer, who attended the meeting, was horrified. On July 29, he wrote to Mr Blair on a single side of A4 headed notepaper from his office.
Friends say it was no easy thing for him to do. He was a close friend of Mr Blair, who gave him his peerage and Cabinet post. The typed letter was addressed by hand, ‘Dear Tony’, and signed by hand, ‘Yours, Peter’.
In it, Lord Goldsmith set out in uncompromising terms why he believed war was illegal. He pointed out that:
Lord Goldsmith ended his letter by saying ‘the situation might change’ – although in legal terms, it never did.
The letter caused pandemonium in Downing Street. Mr Blair was furious. No10 told Lord Goldsmith he should never have put his views on paper, and he was not to do so again unless told to by Mr Blair.
The reason was simple: if it became public, Lord Goldsmith’s letter could make it impossible for Mr Blair to fulfil his secret pledge to back Mr Bush in any circumstances. More importantly, it could never be expunged from the record as copies were stored in No10 and in the Attorney General’s office.
Although Lord Goldsmith had Cabinet status, he attended meetings only when asked. After his letter, he barely attended another meeting until the eve of the war. Mr Blair kept him out to reduce the chance of him blurting out his views to other Ministers.
When Mr Blair is quizzed by the Chilcot Inquiry, he will be asked why he never admitted he was told from the start that the war was illegal.
Equally ominously for Mr Blair, a defiant Lord Goldsmith is ready to defend the letter when he appears before the inquiry. Friends of the peer, widely derided for his role in the Iraq War, believe it will vindicate him.
A source close to Lord Goldsmith said: ‘He assumed, perhaps naively, that Blair wanted a proper legal assessment. No10 went berserk because they knew that once he had put it in writing, it could not be unsaid.
‘They liked to do things with no note-takers, and often no officials, present. That way, there was no record. Everything could be denied.
Heavy-handed: Baroness Morgan and Lord Falconer are said to have ‘more or less pinned Lord Goldsmith to the wall and told him what Blair wanted’
‘Goldsmith threatened to resign at least once. He lost three stone in that period. He is an honourable man and it was a terribly stressful experience.’
Lord Goldsmith’s wife Joy, a prominent figure in New Labour dining circles, played a crucial role in talking him out of quitting.
‘Joy was always very ambitious on Peter’s behalf and did not want to see him throw it all away,’ said a source.
Lord Goldsmith’s letter contradicts Mr Blair’s repeated statements, before, during and after the war on its legality.
In April 2005, the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman repeatedly asked him if he had seen confidential Foreign Office advice that the war would be illegal without specific UN support.
Mr Blair said: ‘No. I had the Attorney General’s advice to guide me.’ At best, it was dissembling. At worst, it was a blatant lie.
Mr Blair knew all along that Lord Goldsmith had told him the war was illegal, and that when the peer finally gave it his cautious backing, he did so only under extreme duress.
The Mail on Sunday has also obtained new evidence about the way Lord Goldsmith was bullied into backing the war at the 11th hour.
He was summoned to a No10 meeting with Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer and Baroness Sally Morgan, Mr Blair’s senior Labour ‘fixer’ in Downing Street. No officials were present.
A source said: ‘Falconer and Morgan performed a pincer movement on Goldsmith. They more or less pinned him up against the wall and told him to do what Blair wanted.’
After the meeting, Lord Goldsmith issued his brief statement stating the war was lawful.
Lord Falconer said in response to the latest revelations: ‘This version of events is totally false. The meeting was Lord Goldsmith’s suggestion and he told us what his view was.’
Baroness Morgan has also denied trying to pressure Lord Goldsmith.
The legal row came to a head days before the war, when the UN refused to approve military action. Stranded, Mr Blair had to win Lord Goldsmith’s legal backing, not least because British military chiefs refused to send troops into action without it.
On March 17, three days before the conflict started, Lord Goldsmith said the war was legal on the basis of previous UN resolutions threatening action against Saddam – even though in his secret letter of July 2002, he had ruled out this argument.
A spokesman for Lord Goldsmith said: ‘This letter is probably in the bundle that has been supplied to the inquiry by the Attorney General’s department. It is presumed they will want to discuss it with him. If so, Lord Goldsmith is content to do so.
‘His focus is on the legality of the war, its morality is for others.’
A spokesman for the Chilcot Inquiry said: ‘We are content we have obtained all the relevant documents.’
A spokesman for Mr Blair refused to say why the former Prime Minister had not disclosed Lord Goldsmith’s July 2002 letter.
‘The Attorney General set out the legal basis for action in Iraq in March 2003,’ he said. ‘Beyond that, we are not getting into a running commentary before Mr Blair appears in front of the Chilcot committee.’
Leading international human rights lawyer Philippe Sands said: ‘The Chilcot Inquiry must make Lord Goldsmith’s note of 29 July, 2002, publicly available to restore public confidence in the Government.’
2002
April 6: Blair meets Bush at Crawford, Texas. They secretly agree ‘regime change’ war against Iraq.
July 23: Blair tells secret Cabinet meeting of war plan. Goldsmith is asked to check legal position.
July 24: Blair tells MPs: ‘We have not got to the stage of military action…or point of decision.’
JULY 19, 2002: Lord Goldsmith photographed ten days before he tells Blair war is illegal
MARCH 20, 2003: Haggard Goldsmith arrives for War Cabinet on day Iraq is invaded
July 29: Goldsmith secretly writes to Blair to tell him war is illegal.
July 30: No10 rebukes Goldsmith. He is excluded from most War Cabinet meetings.
November 8: UN urges Saddam to disarm, but stops short of backing war.
2003
March 7: Despite duress from No10, Goldsmith tells Blair war could be unlawful.
March 13: Goldsmith is allegedly ‘pinned against wall’ by Blair cronies Charlie Falconer and Sally Morgan.
March 17: UN rules out backing war.
March 17: Goldsmith U-turn. In carefully worded brief ‘summary’, he says war is lawful.
March 20: War begins.
2005
April 21: Jeremy Paxman asks Blair if he saw Foreign Office advice saying war was illegal. Blair says: ‘No. I had Lord Goldsmith’s advice to guide me.’
April 24: Mail on Sunday reveals Goldsmith told Blair two weeks before war that it could be illegal.
2009
November 24: Chilcot Iraq War Inquiry begins.
Today: Mail on Sunday reveals Goldsmith’s ‘smoking gun’ letter to Blair in July 2002.
By DAVID ROSE
By the time Tony Blair led Britain to attack Iraq, he had stopped believing his own lurid claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, according to an unpublished interview with the late Robin Cook, the former Leader of the Commons who resigned from the Cabinet just before the invasion in March 2003.
In the interview, which Cook gave me in 2004, the year before his death, he described Blair’s actions as ‘a scandalous manipulation of the British constitution’, adding that if the then Prime Minister had revealed his doubts, they would have rendered the war illegal.
Cook, who was in almost daily contact with Blair in the months before his resignation, said that in September 2002, when the Government published its infamous dossier claiming Saddam had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons and could deploy WMDs within 45 minutes, Blair did believe these claims were true. But he added:
‘By February or March, he knew it was wrong. As far as I know, at no point after the end of 2002 did he ever repeat those claims.’
Tony Blair secures MPs’ support for war on March 18, 2003, as Clare Short looks on. But according to Robin Cook, the PM already knew WMD claims were untrue
On March 18, Blair had to face the Commons to ask it to vote for war but he knew, Cook added, ‘that if he now publicly withdrew the dossier’s claims, his position would be lost’.
Therefore Blair kept silent and so secured the war resolution, though 139 Labour MPs voted against him.
Cook added that if Blair had revealed his doubts, this would also have made it impossible for Lord Goldsmith to issue the fateful legal advice that Britain’s Service chiefs had been demanding: that war would be lawful.
‘What I’ve never seen satisfactorily defended by the Government is whether that opinion still stands up if the premise on which it was based – the claims in the dossier – turn out to be false,’ Cook said.
‘Tony didn’t focus on WMDs only for political reasons, but for legal reasons. He knew he was not going to get the Attorney General on side on any basis other than that Saddam had illegal weapons and could not be disarmed by any means other than war.’
Cook’s is not the only bombshell that remains unpublished. Last week, Sir Christopher Meyer, the former British Ambassador to Washington, told the Chilcot Inquiry that though Blair kept insisting almost to the end that ‘nothing was decided’ on Iraq, his decision to support the invasion actually went back to April 2002, when he visited President Bush’s Texas ranch.
However, both Meyer and other British and American officials told me in 2004 that Blair made up his mind even before April and that even then, Blair was saying in private that Britain would join the attack as long as Bush got UN backing. That meant proving Saddam had active WMDs, as the UN would not authorise an attack on any other basis.
Revelations: Sir Christopher Meyer and the late Robin Cook
Meyer told me: ‘Some time during the first quarter of 2002, Blair had become resigned to war.’
Having committed himself to war, Blair believed he had to get military action approved by the UN to make the invasion legal, and to get the support of his own party back home. But leading figures close to Bush were deeply hostile to this idea, and would have much preferred to attack unilaterally.
Perhaps the most shocking disclosures concerned Blair’s propensity to bend the truth. For example, on July 26, 2002, Clare Short, then International Development Secretary, asked Blair whether war was looming.
His response was that she should go on holiday untroubled, because ‘nothing had been decided, and would not be over the summer’.
In fact, at that very moment, his adviser Sir David Manning was engaged in feverish diplomacy in Washington – because although Blair thought Bush had promised to go to the UN, he seemed to be changing his mind. Manning even had a personal audience with Bush.
A few days later, Bush and Blair spoke by telephone. A senior White House official who read the transcript told me: ‘The way it read was that, come what may, they were going to take out the regime. I remember reading it and thinking, “OK, now I know what we’re going to be doing for the next year.”‘
Later, both leaders would state repeatedly that they had not decided to go to war. But the official said: ‘War was avoidable only if Saddam ceased to be president of Iraq. It was a done deal.’
Yet the hawkish neo-conservatives at the Pentagon were still fighting hard to avoid the UN route, which would require a narrowing of focus on to WMDs. The crunch came at a summit at Camp David on September 7, 2002, when, most unusually, not only Bush but the neo-con vice president Dick Cheney met Blair. Cheney’s role, Meyer said, was solely to try to persuade Bush not to go to the UN.
In desperation, Blair, according to another White House official, told Bush and Cheney that he could be ousted at the Labour conference later that month if Bush ignored the UN. Afterwards, the official said, he and his colleagues pored over the party’s constitution, discovering that it was most unlikely that this threat would materialise.
But by then it was too late: a week after the summit, Bush spoke at the UN General Assembly, and announced America would be seeking what became Resolution 1442 – the resolution that, in Lord Goldsmith’s eyes, allowed British soldiers to kill Iraqis without being prosecuted for murder.
But not all who once saw Blair as a friend have forgiven him. ‘Blair was absolutely the reason why we went to the UN, because it was believed that his political fortunes absolutely demanded it,’ said David Wurmser, formerly Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser. ‘It really was a political concession to Blair – and also a disastrous misjudgment.’
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Gaza, Afghanistan and International Law
December 22, 2009Information Clearing House, posted Dec 21, 2009
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