So, Lord Bingham has given his legal view of the Iraq war: that the invasion was a serious breach of international law.
Is there anyone who hasn’t made up their mind about this already? I doubt it. Of course, Lord Bingham has had to wait until his retirement to make his view public, so can’t be blamed for saying this five years after the event. But I doubt his view has much impact now. All this was pre-Head of Legal, so I don’t think I’ve expressed a view on it; all I’ll say now is that I’m more sympathetic to the government’s legal advice than Lord Bingham is. I think the “revival” argument has something to it.
Saying anything at all in defence of the invasion of Iraq makes you feel as though you’ve done something very impolite.
Let us assume that Bingham is wrong and Goldsmith right. Can you then explain why it became Washington and London which took it upon themselves to decide that Iraq was in breach of resolutions? Would that not be a matter for the Security Council?
As I recall, most international lawyers thought Goldsmith to be wrong including the Foreign Office’s Senior Legal Adviser at the time. She resigned.
At the end of his opinion, Goldsmith talks about “proportionality.” Seems to me that the “shock and awe” tactics etc. were hardly proportionate and we still have no idea of the number of casualties on the Iraqi side.
By the way, I am glad that the opinion was finally put into the public domain. I found the viewpoint that it ought not to be published on the basis of the normal client/solicitor privilege somewhat fatuous in the case of government/attorney-general. The same considerations do not apply to the latter.
Where I might depart from Bingham is in relation to what he said about maltreatment of prisoners. We may not be able to establish that the maltreatment was definite governmental policy but I suspect that it was “not discouraged” by Washington/London.
I don’t think Bingham talked about “extraordinary rendition” but that’s another story where we suspect that governmental hands are not clean.
The discussion about the legality or otherwise of the war is now largely irrelevant.
One should also examine at least two other matters. They are the morality of the decision and the political aspects. I suspect that the political imperatives have entirely dictated the legal moves both at the time and in the subsequent debate. As to the morality of the decision, that is altogether much clearer.
In this case I’d rely on the usual commonsense of the British Public who – albeit slowly – came to their own conclusions. Nice that Lord Bingham has belatedly got with the zeitgeist.