The legality of the Iraq invasion

The UK Iraq Inquiry

Our American friends may not all be aware that momentous events are taking place in London. Momentous for us, I mean ….. nothing much of what happens over here is momentous for you of course, though interesting perhaps!

We have an enquiry going on into the 2nd Gulf War , an enquiry which Premier Gordon Brown set up in an untypical

Sir John Chilcott

and in fact reckless fit of statesmanship but which looks is as if it might be the final nail in his coffin. For a whole series of witnesses are parading in front of Lord Chilcot to give their five penn’worth about the reasons for the invasion.

Now the British public is a magnificent beast, but not particularly famed for long-term memory and just when Iraq was beginning to fade a bit from the radar here it is all surging up again and reminding us what a divisive business it was and how the then government – so it is said – blatantly lied about the reasons for sending our young men to die.

Well, that it all very interesting but here is not the place to go into this enquiry in depth. I did wonder, though, how George Bush seems to have escaped any threat of an enquiry!! You folks sure do things differently over there!

No, what particularly interests me is all the talk about the “legality” of the war, but nobody has explained to me how it can be illegal to attack a mass-murdering gangster, which is all SH was. The  “law” only works if ALL are involved. If someone murders our fellow-humans and sets himself up as leader then he or she can’t have recourse to “the law”, can they? You cannot hide behind legality when you murder all your opponents and hundreds of thousands of others, can you?

Now we Anglo-Saxons – and even the French – profess to believe in “democracy”, even if this sometimes throws up complete idiots as leaders (but I won’t mention any names ….) Yet we trade with despots, we take them seriously, we even kow-tow to them on occasion.

But they are just gangsters, aren’t they? Where is their legitimacy? Nobody voted them in, did they? In Sadaam Hussein’s case, there was a party conference at which his rivals were pulled out of the audience and taken away to be summarily shot. Yet this mass-murderer was supposed to be given the respect of a “leader”?  We even had a British MP going out to Iraq to shake him by the hand! It is of course surreal.

The UN Charter – which all members sign up to – has clauses on human rights, freedom of speech, of assembly and all that stuff, yet a large proportion of members are dictatorships! What a humungous LIE to base the government of the world on! Yet the UN is the body that is supposed to make “international law”!! You couldn’t make it up.

So while the case for the invasion of Iraq is extremely complex and controversial, I for one will certainly  dismiss any claptrap about it being “illegal”. How can it be illegal to bring down a man responsible for the deaths of over  ONE MILLION of our fellow-humans, including the use of gas to destroy a whole village of 5,000 in Kurdistan?

It is often said that “the law is an ass”. Well, in this case I cannot but agree.

By Chris Snuggs

3 thoughts on “The legality of the Iraq invasion”

  1. At the very least, French, British, German and American military support made it possible for Sadam to fight Iran. French pilots even flew the most difficult bombing missions (secretly).

    Yes, Reagan was also selling weapons to Iran, in a fit of free enterprise and creating value through profits.

    A careful examination of the nerve gas question would bring collossal “surprises”. Let’s just say that the idea does not seem to have come from Iraq, and certainly not the means.

    So who are we going to attack, invade, kill and hang now?

    Indignation does not a reflection make.

    PA

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  2. My point was that Iraq under SH was an illegal regime and I can’t see the logic of saying that anything done against an illegal regime can be illegal. The man was into the bargain a mass-murderer and the idea that people in the international community – of which so much was said (especially by France) in trying to thwart the Anglo-Saxon invasion) – should be queueing up to shake the man’s hand and do oil deals with him I find disgusting. France of all countries should understand what freedom and democracy means, having thrown off a tyrant in the Revolution.

    That this famous international community(including China, the world’s biggest dictatorship) should baulk at overthrowing the man responsible for the deaths of over a million people including the 5,000 gassed in a Kurdistan village is utterly shameful.

    As for Reagan and others, there are few angels in the world and of those there are a microscopic proportion have money or power. No country is innocent of sleazy behaviour, particularly the USA and the big countries of Europe apart from Germany. This is why it is so ironical that when FOR ONCE the west (or some of it) did something moral with the overthrow of this hideous mass-murderer that so many, championed by France, should take such a sanctimonious stance on “legality”. Where was the legality of the Chinese massacres in Tibet, for a start?

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