In an about-face Thursday, Prime Minister Tony Blair published the full text of the advice he received on the legality of the Iraq war as he tried to defuse a dispute that has derailed his re-election strategy just one week before national elections.
Parts of the 13-page document, written by Britain’s Atty. Gen. Peter Goldsmith on March 7, 2003, were made public by the British Broadcasting Corp. and Channel 4 on Wednesday, prompting a new furor about whether Blair had misled the nation by depicting the war as unequivocally lawful.
The full document showed that while Goldsmith said in public on March 17, 2003, that the imminent invasion of Iraq was unambiguously legal, the private advice he gave Blair 10 days earlier showed far greater concerns about the lawful consequences of going to war.
“There are a number of ways in which the opponents of military action might seek to bring a legal case, internationally or domestically, against the United Kingdom, members of the government or UK military personnel,” the document said, as it laid out the legal landscape on which arguments for and against the war would be drawn. It concluded with a discussion of the level of force permitted by UN resolutions dating to Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
“But regime change cannot be the objective of military action,” it concluded. “This should be borne in mind in considering the list of military targets and making public statements about any campaign.”
Blair portrayed the war’s objective as disarming Hussein, an argument that brought him severe criticism when no banned weapons were found in Iraq after the invasion.
Before Thursday, Blair had refused to make Goldsmith’s advice public, saying it was covered by legal confidentiality conventions.
The document released Thursday also discussed differences among the Western allies during a period in March 2003, when Blair was under pressure from President Bush to join the invasion whether or not the UN Security Council approved a second resolution specifically authorizing the war.
Blair said Thursday that France in particular had made clear that it would veto a second resolution that might have followed one passed in November 2002, threatening Hussein with “serious consequences” if Iraq did not disarm.
Britain, Goldsmith wrote, believed that, since the cease-fire terms ending the earlier Iraq war in 1991 had been set by the Security Council, “it is for the council to assess whether any such breach of those obligations has occurred.”
“The U.S. have a rather different view: They maintain that the fact of whether Iraq is in breach is a matter of objective fact which may therefore be assessed by individual member states,” he wrote. “I am not aware of any other state which supports this view.”
