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

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