No humanitarian case for Iraq war, says human rights group

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=485143

The United States and Britain had no justification for invading Iraq either on the grounds of alleged threats from illicit weapons and terrorism, or as a humanitarian mission, an international civil rights group said yesterday.

The failure to find Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has left President George Bush and Tony Blair claiming that the invasion was on humanitarian grounds, said a hard-hitting annual report of Human Rights Watch. It said that the West had done nothing when Saddam massacred Kurds and Shias in the past, and there was no evidence of any continuing mass killings at the start of the war in March 2003.

The report claimed that the US and British occupation forces had "sidelined human rights... as a matter of secondary importance. The rule of law has not arrived and Iraq is still beset by the legacy of human rights abuses of the former government, as well as new ones that have emerged under the occupation." The reasons given for war by Mr Bush and Mr Blair - WMD and Saddam's alleged links with international terrorism - hadnot been proved, said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the organisation.

Mr Roth said: "The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair ... such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn't be used to address atrocities that were ignored in the past. Humanitarianism, even understood broadly as a concern for the welfare of people, was at best a subsidiary motive for the invasion of Iraq. Over time, the principal justifications originally given for the Iraq war lost much of their force. More than seven months after the declared end of major hostilities, weapons of mass destruction have not been found. No significant pre-war link between Saddam Hussein and international terrorism has been discovered. The difficulty of establishing stable institutions in Iraq is making the country an increasingly unlikely staging ground for promoting democracy in the Middle East."