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I’ve written numerous articles on the March 7, 2003 weapons inspector reports and talked about them to anyone who seemed interested because it seems unconscionable to me that we went to war using a justification of Weapons of Mass Destruction thirteen days after the UN Weapons inspectors issued these reports saying they hadn’t found any after several months of on the ground inspections.
I had been following the progress of the UN weapons inspectors and the day the reports came out, I talked to several of my friends about them and said it is impossible that the President could take us to war right after these reports.
It is at this point, in my opinion, that going to war and invading Iraq became an unprovoked war of aggression and thus a war crime. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_the_Iraq_WarAt the very least, plans to go to war should have been postponed until the Weapons inspectors completed their inspections, after which we would have found out what we instead found out the hard way, that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq anymore and there hadn’t been for some time.
People talk about many things regarding the run-up to the Iraq war, including blame and justification or lack thereof. In my opinion, all the other issues are close to meaningless in the face of the UN Weapons Inspectors reports of March 7, 2003. You can justify everything that all branches of the US Government did up until then. In fact, as I have written several times, if Bush had responded to those reports by calling off the war and declaring victory for his policy of aggressively confronting Saddam Hussein and getting Weapons Inspection Teams back into the country, it would have been an incredible win for his administration and its Iraq policies. Bush would have assured the safety of the country without having had to go to war.
The fact that Bush and his administration went to war anyway less than two weeks after these reports means that something else other than the safety and security of the United States and its allies was behind the administration’s desire to go to war. We can argue about what that might be, but it is irrelevant in terms of International Law as only the exigency of an extreme and immediate threat to one’s country or one’s allies is enough to avoid a first strike attack or invasion being classified as an unprovoked war of aggression. In fact, even that is a stretch of what the relevant UN Charter sections say about war. Then Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan made it clear when asked about the legality of the war by the BBC, “Yes, if you wish. I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal." See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3661134.stmRegarding US Law, the authorization congress gave the President to go to war, see http://www.c-span.org/resources/pdf/hjres114.pdf was specific in terms of why and in what circumstances congress gave permission for war. The relevant portion of the Resolution states:
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.
(a) AUTHORIZATION.—The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.------------------------------
After the reports of March 7, 2003, it is impossible to claim justification on either 1, or 2 above. Iraq could no longer be considered a credible threat to the US or anyone else and was not in material breach of any UN Resolutions. President Bush exceeded his authority and broke both US and International Law when he invaded Iraq.
Supporters of Bush and his administration are fond of saying that history will validate his administration’s decisions including the decision to go to war in Iraq. I think the opposite is more likely. The more historians examine all the events that led up to the war, the worse the decision to go to war is going to appear. I would love to ask Bush or Cheney or any other member of his administration or any of his supporters one simple question. Why did the administration press so hard for nearly a year to get UN Weapons Inspectors into Iraq only to ignore their findings? I think the truthful answer, which I would never get from any of the aforementioned groups is that they never thought Iraq would agree to let the inspectors back in and that alone would have been a sufficient justification for war. The administration bluffed and Iraq called them on it.
Much discussion has been made since the Obama administration took office regarding “truth commissions” that would investigate whether members of the former Bush administration committed crimes regarding torture of prisoners and other issues. My hope is that an investigation is also conducted into the process and decision-making involved in going to war in Iraq with an eye to whether US or International Law was broken. In my opinion, the answers to those questions are obvious. The UN Weapons Inspectors reports of March 7, 2003 should have stopped the Iraq war from happening. Hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed and trillions of dollars in wasted expenditures are the responsibility of those who made the decision to go to war despite those reports.
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