Attorney General's Advice Becomes Key Election Issue
Whatever the real reasons for going to war with Iraq, Tony Blair sold it to the country on two accounts: intelligence reports that Iraq was an imminent (45min) threat and legal advice that justified the military intervention.
Blair will now be wishing that he had the balls to tell the country that Saddam was a scumbag dictator and needed to go, rather than rely on a couple of ropey lawyerly excuses to justify what needed to be done. Now that the first excuse, intelligence, has been completely debased, and the government got itself wound up in the death of Dr David Kelly to boot, there's no surprise that the other political parties are concentrating on the other leg to the argument - the legal advice given to Tony Blair.
It is now (gradually) emerging, that the following is a reasonable synopsis of the advice given to Tony Blair by the Attorney General in the run up to the war:
• It was the UN's job, not that of individual states, to decide if Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions;
• The use of UN resolution 1441 to justify war might be deficient because it did not include the phrase "all necessary" to enforce it;
• A second UN resolution was needed in 2003 to make the looming war legal;
• Earlier UN resolutions against Saddam could not easily be revived to justify the invasion;
• The UN weapons inspectors were still doing their work and had found no banned weapons;
• The US position on legality did not apply to Britain because Congress had voted President George Bush special war-making powers.
It's unlikely that this one will go away.
Blair will now be wishing that he had the balls to tell the country that Saddam was a scumbag dictator and needed to go, rather than rely on a couple of ropey lawyerly excuses to justify what needed to be done. Now that the first excuse, intelligence, has been completely debased, and the government got itself wound up in the death of Dr David Kelly to boot, there's no surprise that the other political parties are concentrating on the other leg to the argument - the legal advice given to Tony Blair.
It is now (gradually) emerging, that the following is a reasonable synopsis of the advice given to Tony Blair by the Attorney General in the run up to the war:
• It was the UN's job, not that of individual states, to decide if Iraq was in breach of UN resolutions;
• The use of UN resolution 1441 to justify war might be deficient because it did not include the phrase "all necessary" to enforce it;
• A second UN resolution was needed in 2003 to make the looming war legal;
• Earlier UN resolutions against Saddam could not easily be revived to justify the invasion;
• The UN weapons inspectors were still doing their work and had found no banned weapons;
• The US position on legality did not apply to Britain because Congress had voted President George Bush special war-making powers.
It's unlikely that this one will go away.
