Alan Watkins is my favourite British journalist. Well into his 70s now, each week he still produces an elegant and knowing column, usually about British politics. And with a casual understatement that you might easily mistake for irony, he has for the past six years regularly referred to the former prime minister, Tony Blair, as “the young war criminal.”
That may seem a bit harsh, for never has an alleged war criminal seemed more sincere, more open, even more innocent. As he said about his 2003 decision to involve Britain in the American invasion of Iraq in his resignation speech four years later: “Hand on heart, I did what I thought was right.” But everybody does what they think is right.
They may mean pragmatically right, or morally right, or even ideologically right, but one way or another, people will find ways to justify their actions to themselves. When people’s choices lead to the deaths of others, they must eventually be judged by more objective criteria than sincerity. That is now happening to Tony Blair.
Yet another public inquiry in Britain is now looking into the origins and consequences of his decision to attack Iraq, but it will not find him guilty of anything. It is what the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, called “an establishment stitch-up”. Yet the mere existence of the Chilcot inquiry has so shaken Blair that he has made an extraordinary admission. He said on December 13 that he would have invaded Iraq even if he had known that the ‘intelligence’ about the weapons of mass destruction was wrong.“I would still have thought it was right to remove [Saddam Hussein],” he told the BBC. He seemed unaware that he was throwing away the only justification that might stand up before the International Criminal Court.
You must be wondering why I am devoting all this space to a discredited ex-leader whose country once played a minor role in the invasion of a middle-sized Arab country. The war is mostly over now, the dead cannot be brought back to life, and we have lots of new things to worry about.
No exceptions
The point is that there is a law, and they deliberately broke it. Since 1945, it has been a crime to invade another country: that was the main charge brought against Nazi leaders at Nuremberg. The new rule was written into the United Nations Charter, principally at the behest of the United States of America, and there are virtually no exceptions to it.
You have the right to defend yourself if another country attacks you, but you are not allowed to attack another country on the grounds that it has a wicked ruler, or follows policies you disapprove of, or even because you think it might attack you one of these days. No unilateral military action is permitted, and even joint action against a genuinely threatening country is only permissible with the authorization of the UN security council.
The US is a different country now than it was in 1945, and under the Bush administration it announced a “national security” doctrine that directly contradicts this international law, arrogating to the government the right to attack any country it suspects of harbouring evil intentions towards the US.
It’s the sort of thing Britain would have declared when it was top dog in the 19th century, had there been any international law against aggression back then. But this is the 21st century, Britain is no longer top dog, and there is a law now. There is even the ICC to enforce the law, although it never takes action against leaders of rich and powerful countries.
Blair will never face the ICC; even the Chilcot inquiry will be gentle with him. But he started a war on false pretenses (there were no WMD) and at least 100,000 died. He has admitted that he would have started it even if he knew that the WMD didn’t exist (as he probably did). He is a war criminal.
