In Glasgow on 15 February 2003 (when the anti-war march was taking place in London)
Tony Blair was distorting reality with characteristic
kinds of word-twisting. This is what he actually said:
‘The moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case
for removing Saddam. It is not the reason we act. That must be
according to the UN mandate on weapons of mass destruction. But
it is the reason, frankly, why if we do have to act we should do so with
a clear conscience.’
This was a deliberately unclear and issue obscuring statement by
Blair. With hindsight it can be understood more clearly.
As we now know, he did not have that United Nations mandate, and
he did not have real evidence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’, but
he was determined to back the American President George Bush in
the attack on Iraq to get rid of Saddam Hussein.
It is important for the anti-war movement to repeat as often as possible
that by any standard convention of international law it was illegal
for the American-British led forces to invade Iraq without a UN mandate
and to topple Saddam by force - however obnoxious he might
have been. This act broke standard conventions of international law
that exist to protect the integrity of nation states. It set a very danger
ous precedent. In future other powers are likely to attempt to justify
invasions of other nations and topplings of foreign governments of
which they do not approve by back-reference to the U.S.-U.K.-led
attack on Iraq in 2003.
And Blair must have known that what he and Bush were planning to
do was illegal - which was why he put out the smokescreen over
‘weapons of mass destruction’, and which is why, with that
smokescreen now blown away, he attempts to justify the war in terms
of the removal of the tyrant Saddam.
Saddam was a tyrant, yes, but it was illegal for the USA and UK
governments to topple him as they did. You do not fight tyranny
effectively by debasing the rule of law and acting like violent tyrants
yourself.
