The New Forthcoming Downing Street Minutes [View All]

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The New Forthcoming Downing Street Minutes
Submitted by davidswanson on Thu, 2008-02-28 15:54. Media


The war's full story?
By Robert Fox, Guardian


The order to disclose cabinet documents from March 2003 on the legal argument for war in Iraq marks a milestone - but not a huge change. For that has already happened. Usually it would take up to 30 years, or more if they involved state security, for such papers to emerge and be placed in the National Archives.

Now two sets of papers are to be disclosed within 28 days concerning discussions about the case for war. We know that the Attorney General Lord Goldsmith had indicated early in March 2003 that the legal justification for Britain attacking Saddam Hussein was equivocal, and far from clear-cut. Then in or around March 16 2003 we know he changed his mind and he gave a short summary of the legal argument for joining the American offensive.

The new disclosures should explain why he changed his mind, and more to the point who persuaded him to. Since then he said his view was changed concerning two crucial UN security council resolutions, numbers 678 of the late autumn of 1990 and 687 of March 1991. This does not represent an open and shut foundation for a casus belli, as such eminent authorities as Professor Adam Roberts of Balliol College Oxford have explained (pdf).

The UN doesn't allow for the notion of continuing authority. In other words an individual government like the Blair administration in London in 2003 cannot just latch onto any old UN resolution it pleases, and use it as a justification for the use of force. Resolution 678 was the UN mandate for using "all possible means" to eject Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait, which he had seized in an illegal act of aggression the previous August. Presumably, this was discharged when the Iraqi forces were thrown back from Kuwait in the late February of 1991.

Resolution 687 was the UN instrument for Saddam to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, chemical, biological as well as nuclear. It was initialled by senior Iraqi military commanders at a ceremony at Safwan, near the Kuwait border. The mistake was that the American-led coalition did not force Saddam to come to Safwan personally to sign - for that would have given the deal the full strength of an international treaty.

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