LEGAL OR ILLEGAL? WHATEVER!
Richard Perle, a powerful member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and a leading neoconservative advocate of a U.S. war against Iraq, shocked an audience in London Nov. 19 by acknowledging that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a violation of international law.
"In this case," he argued, "international law stood in the way of doing the right thing," thus justifying an illegal attack. He continued by admitting that "some senior voices in American public life [evidently the top leaders of the Bush administration and advisors such as himself] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action with the authority of the UN, then that is a defect is in international law."
Perle, who enjoys considerable influence within the Bush administration, has advocated war against Iraq since 1991 when the first President Bush ended the Gulf War without seizing the country or overthrowing President Saddam Hussein. He was a leading force behind Bush's campaign last fall and winter to gain public, congressional and international support for the impending war. At the time he argued that even without specific UN backing the United States possessed a "legal justification for war."
Washington maintains that the U.S. invasion did not violate international law, based largely on the UN Security Council's vote in November 2002 demanding that the Baghdad government destroy its alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or face "serious consequences." Even though it transpired that Iraq does not possess WMD, the White House suggests that the vague threat of unspecified further action was tantamount to UN approval for war ‹ a position that neither the world organization nor any legal scholars of repute have supported.
As a fallback, President Bush insists that the UN Charter justifies the notion of "pre-emptive self-defense," positing that the U.S. was facing an "imminent threat" from Iraq. In addition, the White House pretends that Baghdad's refusal to implement some earlier UN resolutions justified a war. This perspective would lead to instant international chaos if it was accepted by the UN, which refuses to do so. At the same time, however, the UN will not condemn Washington's invasion, despite it being a flagrant violation of the UN Charter and other international laws.
According to the legal experts at the Washington-based Partnership for Civil Justice, "A war of aggression [such as an unprovoked attack on Iraq] violates the United States Constitution, the United Nations Charter, and the principles of the Nuremberg Tribunal. It violates the collective law of humanity that recognizes the immeasurable harm and unconscionable human suffering when a country engages in wars of aggression to advance its government's perceived national interests. Under international law and historic common legal usage, a preemptive war may be justified as an act of self defense only where there exists a genuine and imminent threat of physical attack. Bush's preemptive war against Iraq doesn't even purport to preempt a physical attack. It purported to preempt a threat that was neither issued nor posed."
Richard Perle now finally agrees that the war violates international law ‹ not from the perspective of an upholder of legality but with the contempt of a criminal who got away with it.