Hans Blix - More than six years later, what was the aim of invading Iraq?

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Friday, Dec 18, 2009

THE GUARDIAN , LONDON-

{snip}

The responsibility for launching the war must be judged against the knowledge that the allies had when they actually started it. The UK should have recognized that no smoking gun had been found at any time, and that in the months before the invasion evidence of WMD was beginning to unravel. As we have heard recently, out of 19 Iraqi sites suspected by the UK — and suggested to the UN monitoring, verification and inspection commission for inspection (UNMOVIC) — 10 were actually inspected, and while “interesting,” none turned up any WMD. This warning that sources were not reliable seems to have been ignored. Intelligence organizations seem to have been 100 percent convinced of the existence of WMD but to have had 0 percent knowledge where they were. Worse still, the uranium contract between Iraq and Niger that Bush had given prominence in his 2002 state of the union message was found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to be a forgery.

The absence of convincing evidence of WMD did not stop the train to war. It arrived at the front before the weather got too hot and the soldiers got impatient waiting for action. The factual reports of the IAEA and UNMOVIC did, however, have the result that a majority on the security council wanted more inspections and were unconvinced about the existence of WMD.

At the end the UK tried desperately to get some kind of authorization from the security council as a legal basis for armed action — but failed. Confirming the fears of former US vice president Dick Cheney, the UN and inspections became an impediment — not to armed action, but to legitimacy.

Unlike the US, the UK and perhaps other members of the alliance were not ready to claim a right to preventive war against Iraq regardless of Security Council authorisation. In these circumstances they developed and advanced the argument that the war was authorized by the council under a series of earlier resolutions. As former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice put it, the alliance action “upheld the authority of the council.” It was irrelevant to this argument that China, France, Germany and Russia explicitly opposed the action and that a majority on the council declined to give the requested green light for the armed action. If hypocrisy is the compliment that virtue pays to vice then strained legal arguments are the compliments that violators of UN rules pay to the UN charter.


http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2009/12/18/2003461239

[valerief]

1. The Defense Industry liked it. So didn't Halliburton and Blackwater and the other

parasites.