Illegality

The British didn't create international law, nor first explain it. That was the Dutch Hugo Grotius. But they advocated it (when they were ahead in the world), codified it, and convinced the rest of the world to buy into it. Including their big, young, awkward child across the Atlantic.

So when its precepts are violated, the British have age old custom and precedent, traditions of interpretation to go upon in making interpretations of what does and does not violate International Law.

The Times of London, continues finding new documents from the 2002-2003 period and discusses them today, and discusses the Bush Administration's violation of International Law:

Those at the meeting on July 23, 2002, included Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The minutes quote Hoon as saying that the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.

Ministry of Defence figures for bombs dropped by the RAF on southern Iraq, obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Commons written answers, show the RAF was as active in the bombing as the Americans and that the “spikes” began in May 2002.

However, the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July meeting, made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.

The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.

The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action. The war finally started in March 2003.

This weekend the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Goodhart, vice-president of the International Commission of Jurists and a world authority on international law, said the intensified raids were illegal if they were meant to pressurise the regime.

He said UN Resolution 688, used by the allies to justify allied patrols over the no-fly zones, was not adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which deals with all matters authorising military force.

I've often had supporters of Bush state that "Saddam was firing at our Airplanes", well if those planes were bombing installations in violation of the UN Resolutions, then Hussains response was consistent with International Law.

Only the Bush Administration could make the Butcher of Baghdad, who had started two prior wars, into the victim of an aggressor. Good job George!

Further intensification of the bombing, known in the Pentagon as the Blue Plan, began at the end of August, 2002, following a meeting of the US National Security Council at the White House that month.

General Tommy Franks, the allied commander, recalled in his autobiography, American Soldier, that during this meeting he rejected a call from Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to cut the bombing patrols because he wanted to use them to make Iraq’s defences “as weak as possible”.

The allied commander specifically used the term “spikes of activity” in his book. The upgrade to a full air war was also illegal, said Goodhart. “If, as Franks seems to suggest, the purpose was to soften up Iraq for a future invasion or even to intimidate Iraq, the coalition forces were acting without lawful authority,” he said.

Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorise military action until October 11 2002.

Bush and his advisers poo-poo'ed this advice on the theory that "hey, when we win nobody will give a damn."

But, now as the war drags on without clear victory and thus into seeping defeat history is not so easily pushed aside. These documents are the Pentagon Papers thirty plus years on. It is not going to get better for the White House.

And it should not.

Wars of Aggression are illegal under International Law. There is no doubt that George Bush is now one behind Saddam Hussein on that count.