What's worse than an illegal war? A legal one

If I hear another anti-war protester or commentator use the word
"illegal" to describe the war in Iraq, I will throttle them. 

Not because I think the war was "legal", or because I supported the war;
in fact I was an implacable opponent of invading Iraq since long before
the invasion took place. Rather, I despise the cries of "illegality"
because implicit in this line of attack is the idea that if the war had
been legal - had the UN security council decided in its infinite wisdom
that Saddam really was tooled up with WMD and thus deserved a whooping
from the west - then the invasion and destruction of Iraq would have
been OK, or at least better. In fact, there would have been only one
thing worse than the illegal war against Iraq, and that would have been
a legal one. 

One reason why anti-war activists are so disgruntled with parliament's
rejection this week of an inquiry into the Iraq war is because they
wanted to use the opportunity to expose the war's illegality - again.
Chris Coverdale of Action Against War said it is "time to hold an
investigation, and part of that investigation should be about uncovering
the illegality of the war". Numerous columnists, celebrity barristers
and former Blairite comedians have spent the best part of the last three
years uncovering the illegality of the war. For them, that has become
the killer argument about Iraq: it was against the law. It's a bit like
turning up to a bloody street brawl in which people were seriously
injured and killed, and saying: "Hmmm. I think a law has been broken
here." 

The predominance of the illegality charge shows that today's anti-war
sentiment is motivated less by genuine anti-imperialism than by a kind
of dinner-party distaste for the consequences of this particular war. It
is the Gray's Inn brigade, some of them former friends of the PM,
effectively saying: "Oh dear, this war doesn't reach our standards of
proof. Let's call it off." It is a legalistic version of the Vatican's
"just war" test, and about as radical. Anyone seriously concerned with
challenging the Iraq war - and more importantly the post-cold war
culture of western interventionism that gave rise to it - should insist
that this intervention was immoral, not illegal. War is far too
important a matter to be left to lawyers and judges. 

The focus on illegality is frustrating for three reasons. First, it is
based on the fanciful notion that there was a golden age, pre-President
Bush, when international law kept the world in order and allowed peace
to reign supreme. Bush is often accused of trampling all over 60 years
of UN rules and regulations and giving rise to an era of illegal warfare
for oil, land, prestige, whatever. This is an idiots' guide to
international relations. It misses out the cold war period from 1945 to
1989, when western powers launched numerous wars and invasions against
supposedly equal sovereign states, including in Aden, Korea, Vietnam,
Grenada and Panama. And it misses out the post-cold war period,
dominated by Clinton and his cling-ons, when there were "humanitarian
wars" in Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone. There has
never been a time when the niceties of international law or the
existence of the UN stopped western powers from carrying out barbaric
acts. 

Second, some of the very same people bleating about the illegality of
the Iraq war were cheerleaders- in-chief of earlier illegal wars. The
Guardian, for example, has been at the forefront of denouncing the Iraq
war for being illegal; last year it published extracts from Philippe
Sands' book Lawless World, which slated Bush and Blair for their
cowboyish disregard for international law over Iraq. Yet seven years
ago, during the Kosovo crisis, the Guardian was at the forefront of
demanding an illegal bombing campaign in Yugoslavia. A leader in the
paper criticised those who said Clinton and Blair should wait for proper
backing from the UN, questioning the notion that the UN is "the only
legitimate law-giver". The UN constitution is a "recipe for inaction",
it said. "Its imprimatur cannot be the sole trigger for international
action to right an obvious wrong." 

Or consider Sands himself. When I ran into him at a public meeting last
year, he admitted that he didn't have a problem with the first Gulf war
because it was "legal" - it was justified by UN resolution 678 which
provided for the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. But what about
its consequences? In a seven-week period, around 250,000 bombs were
dropped, killing, according to a report in the British Medical Journal,
tens of thousands of Iraqis (compared with around 150 Allies who died).
Around 80% of Iraq's water, sewage and electrical facilities were
damaged or destroyed. The war was followed by internal strife -
including the Shia uprising in the south that was viciously suppressed
by Saddam - and by UN sanctions that caused further extreme hardship.
The war also gave rise to a decade of interventionism in Iraq: to
bombing raids over no-fly zones in the north and south, weapons
inspections from 1991 to 1998, Blair and Clinton's bombing campaign of
late 1998, and finally the second Gulf war of 2003. 

Yet according to the "legal war" theorists, this first invasion of Iraq
was OK, because there was a piece of paper that made it "legal". This
exposes the profound moral bankruptcy of legalistic arguments over war.
With the backing of the UN, wars that kill and main tens of thousands of
people are apparently fine; without the backing of the UN, they
apparently are problematic. And sometimes, just for the hell of it, wars
that don't have the backing of the UN (Kosovo) are also fine. Judgements
are made not from the basis of what is good for humanity, or from any
analysis of what terrible consequences the war will have for those on
the receiving end, but rather from the lawyerly approach of making sure
that all the boxes are ticked and all the right procedures were
followed. Legal niceties are elevated over people's lives and
livelihoods. 

Third, the focus on legality/illegality misses out one important point:
if anything, a legal war is worse than an illegal one. In implicitly
arguing that wars must be legal, that legal is good and illegal is bad,
anti-war activists and commentators are effectively calling for even
more coherent and ruthless wars of intervention. For the 2003 invasion
of Iraq to have been legal it would have required even more
international support, more states lined up against the collapsing
Ba'athist regime and the beleaguered Iraqi people, more of a consensus
that Iraq was a threat to the world and thus needed to be suppressed. A
legal war would have been even more devastating for Iraq than the
illegal war has been. 

Forget questions of legality. They shouldn't even come into it. Like the
humanitarian attacks on Somalia, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan before it,
the invasion of Iraq was immoral and destructive - which means that even
if, in legal terms, it had been right, it would still have been wrong.