- WASHINGTON -- International
lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after
the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion
of Iraq had been illegal.
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- In a startling break with the official White House and
Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think
in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
-
- President George Bush has consistently argued that the
war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions
on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an
act of self-defence permitted by international law.
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- But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board,
which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international
law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and
this would have been morally unacceptable.
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- French intransigence, he added, meant there had been
"no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing
with Saddam Hussein".
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- Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the
Institute of Contemporary Arts at the Old Vic theatre in London, had argued
loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991
Gulf war.
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- "They're just not interested in international law,
are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality
last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use
it."
-
- Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official
justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented
CND and also participated in Tuesday night's event. Certainly the British
government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is
entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation
to Iraq".
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- The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a
divergence of view between the British government and some senior voices
in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's
the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action
without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
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- Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by
the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified
under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence,
including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March,
Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force"
to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
-
- The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned
that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule
on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat. Coalition
officials countered that the security council had already approved the
use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious
consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete accounting of its
weapons programmes.
-
- Other council members disagreed, but American and British
lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first
Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.
-
- "I think Perle's statement has the virtue of honesty,"
said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the
war, arguing that it was illegal. "And, interestingly, I suspect a
majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost
exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration
said that all along."
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- The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship
of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of
the advisory board.
-
- A Pentagon spokesman pointed out yesterday that Mr Perle
was not on the defence department staff, but was a member of an unpaid
advisory board.
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- Mr Perle refused to elaborate on his remarks.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1089158,00.html
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