Iraq committed numerous acts of war, anyone of which would have justified the recent war to overthrow the Baath regime since 1991.

1) Firing missiles every single day at planes patroling the northern and southern no fly zones.
2) Attempting to assasinate George Bush senior in 1995 when he was on a visit to Kuwait.
3) Expelling UN weapons inspectors in December 1998

Michael, you make this too easy.

1) Firing missiles every single day at planes patrolling the northern and southern no fly zones.

They had no legal basis (according to Butros Butros Ghali) and were used to bomb civilian as well as military targets. Also Turkey was allowed to enter the no-fly zones with US and British sanction to assassinate prominent Kurds. Just in case you believed that they were there for humanitarian reasons rather than geo-political reasons.

2) Attempting to assassinate George Bush senior in 1995 when he was on a visit to Kuwait.

Yes and wasn’t the response, firing cruise missiles into Baghdad, killing 14 civilians, and failing even to wound Saddam, so utterly proportionate? Oh incidentally, this would be a good reason for half the populated world to declare war on the USA, but I'm sure you realised that, being such a smart cookie.

3) Expelling UN weapons inspectors in December 1998

Well actually, as has been admitted by Jack Straw, the weapons inspectors were removed prior to operation “Desert Fox”.

Try reading a newspaper other than The Sun for your propaganda Mike and you might just make this difficult.

Oh and stop trolling this site. I mean, you have every right to free speech and to access to important debates, but your mindless contrarianism smacks of idiocy and the fact that you always respond to articles about Iraq within a few minutes of their being posted makes me suspect that you spend all day on the internet looking at porn and trolling and that you don’t have many friends. Go get some sunshine!

Oh and learn to spell “assassinate”, aSS-aSS-in-ate, that’s two troll posts now where you’ve spelt it wrong.

Regards

as usual, you're talking rubbish. however point 3 is perhaps the silliest - in fact bill clinton withdrew the arms inspectors to provide a story to detract from his affair. don't believe me? ask scott ritter.

incidentally the american planes in the no-fly zones which were engaged in almost daily bombing raids were commiting acts of war.

"Iraq committed numerous acts of war, anyone of which would have justified the recent war to overthrow the Baath regime since 1991."

I can't tell if you are being serious or not. You might have a case, Michael - it is unfortunate however, that every case you cite is wrong.

"1) Firing missiles every single day at planes patroling the northern and southern no fly zones."

The no-fly zones, whatever might be said in their favour, were established by the decision of the governments of the United States, Britain and France (which later withdrew in 1996 in protest at the deliberate prolongation of the conflict by its allies). They never had any legal authority.

The attacks on US and British aircraft never succeeded in even damaging a plane and were carried out largely in response to an aerial assault on Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, in 1998 which went well beyond these no-fly zones.

"2) Attempting to assasinate George Bush senior in 1995 when he was on a visit to Kuwait."

This incident was supposed to have happened in 1993. In fact, the evidence cited as proof of this effort on Bush Sr's life has always been extremely weak. Such an act by itself would hardly justify an invasion, and the US is in a poor position to decry other countries' assasination attempts on foreign statesmen.

Bush Sr and Clinton, however, did certainly attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein during this period, whatever you choose to make of that.

"3) Expelling UN weapons inspectors in December 1998"

The weapons inspectors were not expelled by the Iraqi regime, but withdrawn by the UN at the insistence of Washington and London in the build-up to Operation Desert Fox - the claim that they were expelled has been made many times, but was even withdrawn by Tony Blair after he was challenged on this by Jeremy Paxman in a television interview.

The weapons inspection process had broken down and Iraqi responsibility is clear enough, though the constant bad faith prolongation of tensions by Washignton and London, and the public acknowledgement by both that they had abused the UN inspections by infiltrating them with their own intelligence operatives, clearly served to bring this about.

The Iraqi regime, had of course, committed many acts of aggression before the First Gulf War, and numerous, massive atrocities on its own soil.

But Michael, if you are going to advocate a course of massive violence, such as a full-scale invasion of another country, you should check the facts first.

The legality of the war is no doubt a matter for debate.

But what constitutes a 'legal' war?

Sim 1 seems to have made all of my points before i could send off mine, rendering them a bit redundant...

It was good wasn't it? In a bad sort of way.

Anyone interested in what constitutes a legal war should see the reports produced by Action Against War, who are aiming 'to investigate and utilise every possible avenue available to prevent Britain using military force to resolve international disputes'.

There is a report on the site called 'The Illegal War' which should provide many answers.

Action Against War is also advocating a 'Tax Strike' to stop the flow of funds that go directly towards the war against Iraq. They say that anyone paying taxes could face criminal charges.

The real reason for the northern and southern no fly zones was not strategic but to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shia muslims in the south from Saddams' armed forces. Incidently Turkey was only allowed into the northern no fly zone to hunt for terrorists from Turkish Kurdistan! Given that terrorists in Turkish Kurdistan had been carrying out bomb attack in Turkish cities and frequently took refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan such action by Turkey was justified.

Second Allied war planes patroling the no fly zones only fired at targets when they were either shot at first or else locked onto by Iraqi radar! Some stray bombs unfortunatly hit civilian targets but there was no intention to target civilian areas only military installations from which allied planes had been attacked.

Iraq in December 1998 accused the UN inspectors of spying and so stopped them from doing their job! That is why they were removed from Iraq. Saddam had also tried to harrass and intimidate the UN inspectors for 7 years making their job extremely difficult.

If you want accurate information on the build up to Gulf War II then visit this American military discussion forum;  http://forums.military.com/eve/ubb.x/a/cfrm/f/81519858
It is here that I get my information! Not from the Sun newspaper, Daily Mail, or even the BBC, but from the troops in the know!

Oh dearie me, bit of a slip-up there. Your pro-war troll handbook should tell you never to talk about Kurds in Iraq and Kurds in Turkey in the same speech, otherwise you have to portray the Iraqi Kurds as good oppressed folk fighting a heroic resistance but the ones in Turkey as evil terrorists threatening our way of life. And then you run into the problem that in many cases you're describing exactly the same people!

Yes, Micheal, read completely unbiased coverage of the build-up to the Gulf War from the completely independent US militiary discussion board. Get information about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the completely unbiased and not-at-all fascist Betar website.

Do you ever worry that perhaps you may be a fanatic and have a problem with critical thinking?

"The real reason for the northern and southern no fly zones was not strategic but to protect the Kurds in the north and the Shia muslims in the south from Saddams' armed forces."

This doesn't stand up to very much scrutiny, Michael.

The northern no-fly zone was established after the US intervention in northern Iraq at the end of the Gulf War which provided a safe haven for Iraqi Kurds in the north of the country, largely to assist US ally Turkey which was confronted with a massive refugee flow of Iraqi Kurds which its anti-Kurdish government found unwelcome, fearing destabilisation.

The southern no-fly zone had no such humanitarian consequences. It was established well after it would have made a difference and after the US had already quietly assisted Saddam in his merciless crushing of the Shia Intifada. The Bush Senior administration permitted the Iraqi army to use specially designated helicopter gunships for the purpose of counter-insurgency, refused to talk to the rebels, and Coalition troops even dug trenches across southern Iraq to slow the rebels down and assist the Ba'athist regime.

The Bush Senior administration's clear hostility to the Shia intifada was probably crucial in causing Iraqi generals to predict that Saddam would be the victor and stick with him right when his overthrow seemed imminent.

"Incidently Turkey was only allowed into the northern no fly zone to hunt for terrorists from Turkish Kurdistan! Given that terrorists in Turkish Kurdistan had been carrying out bomb attack in Turkish cities and frequently took refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan such action by Turkey was justified."

This reads out like handout from the Turkish embassy - it is a gross white-washing of the Turkish military's war of atrocity against the country's Kurdish population, which killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 3 million over a period of about 15 years and was accopmanied by the kinds of crimes that have made Bosnia notorious.

The Turkish army had no more right to pursure this filthy war outside its borders than Serbia would have had to raid Macedonia or Albania while waging war on Kosova.

The Turkish military incursions into Iraqi Kurdistan were greatly resented by Iraqi Kurds, who despite their dependence on US goodwill, have vehemently rejected any and all subsequent efforts by the US to encourage Turkish military involvement in Iraq.

It also prompted an outcry among some US pilots a few years ago who objected to the cynicism of pretending that Turkish bombing raids weren't happening when they were officially charged with protecting Kurds from air attack.

"Second Allied war planes patrolling the no fly zones only fired at targets when they were either shot at first or else locked onto by Iraqi radar!"

Yeah, whatever. It's the standard claim of all the world's armies that every bullet and missile fired is only fired in self-defence. I'll bet even the Burmese army claims that it only shoots at terrorists and even then only after being fired upon. Lists of areas in Iraq hit by US and British missiles put together by UN sources contradict such glib assurances.

Note again that no US or British aircraft were damaged, let alone brought down during this period, and that US bombing was sometimes extended to the whole of Iraq.

"Iraq in December 1998 accused the UN inspectors of spying and so stopped them from doing their job! That is why they were removed from Iraq."

OK, so you're not claiming that they were expelled any more.

But it was a bit more than just an accusation from Saddam. It was a fact - and one quietly admitted by some of those responsible for the infiltration of a legitimate UN disarmament team for espionage purposes.

Bear in mind that in December 1998, the Iraqi regime had dismantled its entire unconventional weapons programmes for at least three years - as we now know and as many of us suspected at the time. The weapons inspections, linked to the shut down of the Iraqi economy and threats of military retaliation, were clearly abused by Washington and London's bad faith, which helped provoke this crisis.

"Saddam had also tried to harrass and intimidate the UN inspectors for 7 years making their job extremely difficult."

Their work was, however, extremely successful, as we now know. And US intelligence was in a position to conclude, as many did, that the Iraqi regime had been effectively disarmed by this time.

(This is, of course, the beginning of a discussion that has been run over many, many times before...)

For information, Mark Curtis' books ('Web of Deceit' and 'Unpeople') are pretty good as Sim 1 suggests, but i would recommend more Said K. Aburish's book "Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge" for a look at Saddam's horrific career up to 1999, and Andrew and Patrick Cockburn's "Saddam Hussein: An American Obsession" (it used to be called 'Out of the Ashes') which is the best book i know about Iraq after the First Gulf War.

It looks like I forgot to post the website address which is:
 http://www.actionagainstwar.org/

Not wishing to show off... just thought i shouldn't have left him out: other good books include those written by the independent researcher for the peace movement Milan Rai (who also has plenty of ground-level experience of Iraq) - 'War Plan Iraq' and 'Regime Unchanged'. Patrick Cockburn's is probably the best place to start, however.

The "Iraqi" resistance last night bombed another Shiite Mosque, killing about 40 such irrelevancies.

Men, women, children.

"As we were inside the mosque, we saw a ball of fire and heard a huge explosion," said Tahir Abdullah Sultan, 45. "After that blood and pieces of flesh were scattered around the place," he added

 http://www.smh.com.au/news/World/At-least-36-dead-in-Iraq-suicide-bombings/2005/03/11/1110417641675.html

Sure, the Iraqi resistance are fascists and racists who murder women and kids and civilians.

"But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity."

- Arundhati Roy

 http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/605/605p28.htm

"You know, we must understand that the resistance movement in Iraq is a resistance movement that all of us have to support, because it's our war, too."

- Arundhati Roy

 http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0520-07.htm

"When the resistance does fight awful, terrible things happen, but where does the blame lie? It doesn't lie with the resistance, it lies with the invader, and the invader has to get out."

- John Pilger

 http://www.iso.org.au/socialistworker/529/p2f.html

Excellent, about time too, where can I send funds to support your cause. Well done, we are with you.

Instead of giving a name the above anonymous poster has chosen to call themselves by an accusation - "How the Peace Movement Works".

Which merely serves to underline a complete lack of familiarity with the peace movement, as well as a lack of honesty.

Many of us regard what John Pilger and Arundhati Roy (normally much better commentators) have said on this subject as reprehensible and you have no right to attempt to smear everyone else who opposes the Iraq War.

The brutal, reactionary and sectarian nature of much of the Iraqi mujahideen is not in question among many of us. Your attempt at outrage might carry greater weight if you acknowledged that Coalition forces in Iraq have killed civilians far, far in excess of Iraqi rebels.

There are former sports pitches in Fallujah that have been converted in large, makeshift cemetaries to accommodate those killed in the US Marines' assault in April alone. Men, women, children. Irrelevancies, to use your preferred term. And let's leave out the pretense that all these deaths only occur by some sort of accident after trying so very hard not to kill civilians (while flattening a city with indiscriminate force).

A friend of mine was in an ambulance which came under attack from US troops.

And when the Pentagon openly discusses its "Salvador Option", what do we imagine they mean by that?

Who is this person trying to take our dear Queen to Court, does this person not know that HM is above the law and cannot be be sued. In actual fact, this person should be tried for High Treason and kept in the Tower of London for all to see.

Tower of London, yes please, 3 meals a day inclusive, room and board, excellent lets prosecute all those who oppose the war, as long as you promise the following:

1. No torture, no chains, no lock-up for 23 hours;
2. Breakfast in Bed, Gourmet Lunch and Dinners of choice;
3. Visitors who are able to visit any time and bring presents;
4. Access to the Crown Jewels, especially the Diamond that belongs to India;
5. Air conditioning given the pollution in the air;
6. Daily newspapers;
7. TV and radio access, magazines including Playboy;
8. Room with a view, windows without bars;
9. Room next to Tony Blair, opposite Lord Goldsmith, and all the other innocents;

Thank you so much for recommending Treason for citizens who are not responsible for the killing, torture and embezzlement of funds belonging to UK, US and Iraqi people.

BTW, is this going to be with or without any charges for a period exceeding 3-years, etc., etc.

There are new allegations that heavily armed private security contractors in Iraq are brutalizing Iraqi civilians. American company named Custer Battles, hired by the Pentagon to conduct dangerous missions guarding supply convoys. "What we saw, I know the American population wouldn't stand for," Heavily armed security operators on Custer Battles' missions — among them poorly trained young Kurds, who have historical resentments against other Iraqis — terrorized civilians, shooting indiscriminately as they ran for cover, smashing into and shooting up cars. On a mission on Nov. 8, escorting ammunition and equipment for the Iraqi army, they claim a Kurd guarding the convoy allegedly shot into a passenger car to clear a traffic jam. "[He] sighted down his AK-47 and started firing," says Colling. "It went through the window. As far as I could see, it hit a passenger. And they didn't even know we were there." Later, the convoy came upon two teenagers by the road. One allegedly was gunned down. "The rear gunner in my vehicle shot him," says Colling. "Unarmed, walking kids." In another traffic jam, they claim a Ford 350 pickup truck smashed into, then rolled up and over the back of a small sedan full of Iraqis. "The front of the truck came down," says Craun. "I could see two children sitting in the back seat of that car with their eyes looking up at the axle as it came down and pulverized the back." "I said, 'Wow, what hit this car?'" remembers Hough. Could anyone have survived? "Probably not. Not from what I saw," says Hough. The men assume that in all three incidents the Iraqis were seriously hurt or killed. But they can't be sure. "It was chaos and carnage and destruction the whole day," says Craun. Two of the men — Craun and Colling — say they quit immediately.
Craun, in an e-mail two days later to a friend at the Pentagon, wrote: "I didn't want any part of an organization that deliberately murders children and innocent civilians."
Errante says he also quit after witnessing wild, indiscriminate shootings on two other missions. "I said I didn't want to be a witness to any of these, what could be classified as a war crime," says Errante. This is not the firm’s first brush with controversy. Custer Battles is a relatively new company in the booming field of so-called "private military companies" in Iraq providing veteran soldiers from around the world for various security jobs. Named for founders Michael Battles and Scott Custer, who are military veterans, the company quickly nabbed lucrative contracts in Iraq, where U.S. authorities needed firms who were willing to accept high-risk assignments.

Security contractors largely unrequlated

The company is already under criminal investigation for allegations of fraud centering on the way it billed the government. Those allegations are also at the heart of a lawsuit by former associates. In September, the military banned the firm and its associates from obtaining new federal contracts or subcontracts. Custer Battles denies it committed any fraud, and says the company has been the target of "baseless allegations" made by "disgruntled former employees" and competitors. It has said it hopes that the government will overturn the suspension on new contracts. In any case, the ban didn’t stop the company from fulfilling its old contracts, such as the missions performed by Craun, Hough, Colling and Errante. "These aren't insurgents that we're brutalizing," says Craun. "It was local civilians on their way to work. It's wrong."

DOES ANYONE HAVE INFORMATION ON NEPALI GURKHA PRIVATE SECURITY GUARDS WORKING IN IRAQ, REMIND ME SOMEONE, WHEN DID IRAQ THREATHEN NEPAL??????????????????????????????????????

the Mischon Lecture,

Lawless World: International Law after 9/11 and Iraq

to be delivered by Professor Philippe Sands QC

at 6pm on thursday 12 May 2005.

The chair will be taken by The Rt Hon Lord Bingham of Cornhill

Tickets can be requested at the email below:

So many British security firms are cashing in on the violence in Iraq that armed private security men now outnumber most of the national army contingents in the country.

Thousands of former soldiers and police officers from Britain, the US, Australia and South Africa are earning wages as high as £600 a day to protect Western officials, oil company executives and construction firm bosses in Iraq. The SAS is said to be suffering an unprecedented loss of personnel as its highly trained soldiers are lured by lucrative private security work.

With business of around £1bn, British companies are estimated to have the biggest share of private security contracts in Iraq. According to experts, between 1,200 and 1,500 former British soldiers and police officers, including former SAS, Marines, paratroopers and RUC officers, are working in Iraq. Some privately estimate that the total number of foreigners working for private security companies now exceeds the 8,700 British troops there.

Apart from the major US and British companies, dozens of small firms have set up shop in Iraq. Former British and American special forces members speak of their concern that smaller firms are hiring personnel with little experience with firearms and have no interest in setting out the circumstances in which their employees may use their weapons.

The presence of thousands of armed Westerners and others, including Gurkhas and Fijians, says much about America's fear of military casualties. Security firms are escorting convoys. Armed men from an American company are guarding US troops at night inside the former presidential palace where Paul Bremer, the American proconsul, has his headquarters. When a US helicopter crashed near Fallujah last year, an American security firm took control of the area and began rescue operations.

Details of the number of companies here - there may be as many as 400 - are further complicated by the number of security firms that are subcontracted by larger companies on a daily or weekly basis. Larger companies such as Control Risks complain that many are unregistered and uninsured.

Much of the money being earned by British companies is coming from the British taxpayer. The Independent on Sunday has learnt that the Foreign Office and Department for International Development have spent nearly £25m on hiring private bodyguards, armed escorts and security advisers to protect their civil servants. That figure is set to increase sharply in July when sovereignty is handed over to an Iraqi administration.

The largest contract is with Control Risks, which has earned £23.5m. It employs about 120 staff to protect about 150 British officials and contractors.

Though contractors can use lethal force, the U.S. government does not vet who is hired. The Pentagon says it does watch how companies perform and investigates any alleged misconduct.

by By Lisa Myers & the NBC investigative unit, NBC News
February 16th, 2005


They are the Army you rarely see: Thousands of heavily armed security contractors protecting top officials and escorting convoys — most paid by U.S. taxpayers.

But unlike American soldiers, critics say these men sometimes operate under vague rules with little accountability.

"It's like the wild, wild West," says Jim Errante, a former contractor in Iraq.

One former manager in Iraq tells NBC News he caught inexperienced, frightened security teams literally shooting civilian cars off the road to clear the way for a convoy.

Though contractors can use lethal force, the U.S. government does not vet who is hired. The Pentagon says it does watch how companies perform and investigates any alleged misconduct.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Montgomery Meigs — who monitored U.S. contractors in Bosnia — says it's up to companies themselves and to military commanders in Iraq to ensure rules are followed.

"It's difficult. And it takes a special effort by the military chain of command," says Meigs, who also serves as an NBC military analyst. "If they're overburdened fighting a war, it's even more difficult."

Contractors who commit crimes can be prosecuted under U.S. law.

How disciplined are these men?

"[It varies] greatly from highly professional contractors to flat-out dangerous guys," says Col. Thomas Hammes, a Marine instructor at the National Defense University in Washington.

Hammes spent two months working alongside Iraqis. He says some contractors showed outright contempt for civilians. And even good contractors sometimes used tactics that turned Iraqis against the United States.


"If the government is hiring people that are running them off the road and intimidating them, that really undercuts your message," says Hammes.

But contractors say they perform a vital role, with discipline.

"We aren't cowboys," says Chris Taylor, who is a security contractor for a firm named Blackwater. "Nobody's running around with bandanas and knives in our teeth."

Given the dangers in Iraq — where 70 security operators have been killed — they argue that extreme tactics sometimes are necessary.

"When you have people that are ready to kill you if they get the opportunity, it means getting caught in a traffic jam can be a lethal experience," says Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association.

Private contractors say they're essential to the war effort, but critics say they sometimes undermine the battle for Iraqi hearts and minds.

treason
noun [U]
(the crime of) lack of loyalty to your country, especially by helping its enemies or attempting to defeat its government:
Guy Fawkes was executed for treason after he took part in a plot to blow up the British Parliament building.

treasonable
adjective (ALSO treasonous) FORMAL
a treasonable offence
treasonable activities

high treason noun [U]
the committing of a crime which seriously threatens the safety of your country

war [Show phonetics]
noun [C or U]
1 armed fighting between two or more countries or groups, or a particular example of this:
nuclear war
a war film/grave/hero/poet
If this country goes to (= starts to fight in a) war we will have to face the fact that many people will die.
Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939 as a result of the invasion of Poland.
War broke out between the two countries after a border dispute.
They've been at war for the last five years.
He died in World War 1/the Vietnam war.

2 war of attrition a war which is fought over a long period and only ends when one side has neither the soldiers and equipment nor the determination left to continue fighting

3 war of nerves a situation, often before a competition or battle, in which two opposing sides attempt to frighten or discourage each other by making threats or by showing how strong or clever they are

4 any situation in which there is fierce competition between opposing sides or a great fight against something harmful:
The past few months have witnessed a price war between leading supermarkets.
The government are to step up their attempt to wage war against/on drugs.

lie (SPEAK FALSELY)
verb [I] lying, lied, lied
to say or write something which is not true in order to deceive someone:
Are you lying to me?
Don't trust her - she's lying.
I suspect he lies about his age.
See also liar. See Note lay or lie? at lay (PUT DOWN).

lie
noun [C]
something that you say which you know is not true:
I told a lie when I said I liked her haircut.

Could someone clarify the facts about this, was it a war or illegal invasion, it is important to ensure that we understand the correct definition. ILLEGAL WAR OR ILLEGAL INVASION. Tariq Ali, the Vietnam era activist, is the only one who seems to have got it right, can we have more from this wonderful guy.

Who is next, lets see, they have surrounded Iran on all sides, Syria is a stones throw away from Israel, North Korea is maybe a long term prospect, and Zimbabwe has been contained, just as was Iraq during the 12-long years of sanctions. Iran will be easier, US and other coalition troops are amassed on their borders from Iraq, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and the sea Bourne armada of carriers and other war ships. Sudan is no longer a threat as the Oil reserves are guaranteed to flow to the west. The anti-war protesters are doing what they do best, marching up and down the country and not doing anything meaningful really, wasting money on hiring coaches, a few personalities ensuring that their names are not forgotten, talk, march, that is all they do. Is it not time to take this matter the next logical step up, do something that we all can support, I am sick and tired of your marches, this is the eleventh one I believe, well, consider this your 11th Hour wake up call, no more marches, time for action now. Let us support this effort to take legal action, where do I sign up.

WARMONGER

Who is Moeen Raoof???

The role played by King Abdullah II of Jordan in the Illegal Invasion of Iraq during 2003 should not be forgotten. Prior to the invasion, King Abdullah declared that the eastern border of Jordan with Iraq was closed, what he omitted to mention was that only coalition Special Forces were allowed to cross into Iraq to conduct special operations prior and during the invasion that is now known to be illegal. This is a traitorous act of complicity by an Arab head of state against his own peoples. This traitor should stand down and let his uncle, the rightful King El Hassan bin Talal, to take his throne.

"One senior American officer said that in any urban fight, American troops could turn Falluja into 'a killing field in a couple of days…' One senior American officer said, 'How Falluja is resolved has huge reverberations, not just in Iraq but throughout the entire area.' Or, as another senior officer put it, 'We have the potential to turn this into the Alamo if we get it wrong.'" (Eric Schmitt, U.S. General at Falluja Warns a Full Attack Could Come Soon, the New York Times)

"A security contractor killed in Iraq last week was once one of South Africa's most secret covert agents, his identity guarded so closely that even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission did not discover the extent of his involvement in apartheid's silent wars… In South Africa he joined the SA Defence Force's secret Project Barnacle, a precursor to the notorious Civil Co-operation Bureau (CCB) death squad… In 1985 he was involved in planning the now notorious SADF raid on Gaborone in which 14 people, including a five-year-old child, were killed." (Julian Rademeyer, Iraq victim was top-secret apartheid killer, the Sunday Times [of South Africa])

"A former British soldier shot while guarding workers in Iraq predicted being 'over-run' in an e-mail the night before his death in the town of Hit… Mr Bloss, who is believed to have served with the parachute regiment in Northern Ireland, was working for a Virginia-based security firm, Custer Battles." (Iraq Briton's final tragic e-mail, BBC News)

"In the first months of the occupation, [said Bessam Jarrah, an Iraqi surgeon,] we, the educated people, thought America would show us a humanitarian way, a political way, to solve problems… But this use of force means the efforts to find a political solution for Iraq has failed, and now America is using Saddam's approach to problems: brute force. America won the war on April 9 last year; they lost the war on April 9 this year. That is what Iraqis feel." (Alissa J. Rubin, Carnage Dims Hopes for Political Way in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times)

A new word order

Imagine that: The Iraqis of Fallujah in "the Alamo" and a British "security contractor," with previous experience in Northern Ireland, working for the oddly named Custer Battles, a Virginia "security firm," and dying in the Iraqi town of Hit. Custer Battles, by the way, also " has the airport security contract in Baghdad. Airport security in this context does not mean bored attendees standing by an X-ray machine, but rather former Green Berets and Ghurka fighters defending the airport from mortars, rockets and snipers."

So we now have potential Iraqi Davy Crocketts and Jim Bowies facing off against the modern equivalent of "the Seventh Cavalry," filled with Gurkhas, Chileans of the Pinochet regime, South African former death squad members, former British special forces officers, American ex-Seals and the like amid what Alissa Rubin of the Los Angeles Times calls a "culture of impunity" in Iraq. Though she's referring to the world of Iraqi kidnappers and assassins, the word "impunity," which means "exemption from punishment, penalty, or harm," and has an old-fashioned imperial edge to it, also catches something of the Bush administration stance toward Iraq and the greater world.

The men of Custer Battles guard Baghdad's airport, while the men of Blackwater USA -- if still waters run deep, how do blackwaters run, and where do they get these names? -- four of whom were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, provide the fulltime security team of ten guarding our "administrator" in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and various members of the Iraqi Governing Council. They are part of a new word and world order taking disheveled shape in what may indeed become the "killing fields" of Iraq, an order that we have no reasonable language whatsoever to describe.

In Imperial China, a new dynastic emperor ascending the throne performed a ceremony involving what was called "the rectification of names." This was on the theory that the previous dynasty had fallen, in part, because the gap between reality and the way it was named had grown to abyss-like proportions. Of course, this yawning gap between the world out there and the words used to describe it has been an essential aspect of Bush-induced American reality since September 11, 2001. It has been at the heart of the American bubble (like the moving "bubble" within which our President travels the world, emptying the centers of whole cities as he passes by in the process of creating some kind of Potemkin planet).

We can see the results of this in an unnerving survey just conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland (www.pipa.org/) and discussed this week by Jim Lobe of Inter Press News (Bush's believe it or not). Not only, he reports, does "a majority of the public still believe Iraq was closely tied to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and had WMD stocks or programs before US troops invaded the country 13 months ago," but a significant majority believe that Saddam's Iraq was in some way involved in the 9/11 attacks and believe that "experts" back them on all these points. They believe as well that global opinion favored our going to war with Iraq or at least was "evenly balanced" on the subject -- and most of these figures vary at best only slightly from prewar polling figures (even as dissatisfaction over presidential "handling" of post-war Iraq policy has risen dramatically). Holding such misperceptions is, in turn, closely correlated with the urge to reelect George Bush in November.

Explain this as you will -- and certainly a ceaseless drumbeat of administration "explanations," magnified (until just about yesterday) in the echo chamber of the media, has to account for much of this -- the disjuncture between the world and how Americans insist on seeing it remains wide indeed and a willingness to acknowledge this in the mainstream -- certainly among mainstream politicians -- low indeed. For instance, all of official Washington, as Tony Karon of Time magazine recently wrote, speaks as one about "staying the course" in Iraq, and though that "course" is, at best, an obstacle course, woe be to anyone who breaks ranks. ("Washington may be deeply divided over how the Bush administration took America into Iraq, but there is a remarkable unanimity in support of the President's resolve to finish the job.")

This is what passes for "security" thinking in America just as companies like Custer Battles, Dyncorp, and Blackwater USA pass for "security firms." Such thinking -- and the language that goes with it -- is part and parcel of the creation of what should perhaps be called a National Insecurity State itself teetering atop an Insecurity Planet.

Bush administration officials have assumed that the globe's only superpower can simply insist on and define the reality it wants; and no one, whatever the objections, will have the brute power to redefine it. The world, however, is -- as they are discovering in Iraq -- a far more complex and recalcitrant place than they've cared to imagine.

With that in mind, let's consider a few of the key terms that both in government pronouncements and in media coverage of Iraq add up to the bubble language that stands between Americans and a reasonable perception of the world out there:

"Security firms": It's in the nature of human beings, when they take marginal activities and bring them into the mainstream to want to professionalize them and so upgrade their status. Once upon a time, there were scattered "soldiers of fortune" and "mercenaries" in our world, former soldiers or wannabe soldiers who, as in Southern Africa in the 1980s, sold themselves to any bidder and shouldered arms for various, largely right-wing regimes. Now, this seat-of-the-pants mercenary business has become a $100 billion dollar global operation (with the U.S. government as its largest employer) and you can search our press far and wide rarely coming across the terms "mercenary," "soldier of fortune," "hired guns," "rent-a-cops," or anything else that might bring us closer to the tawdry reality of what these so-called security companies are actually selling. The employees of these firms are in turn usually called "contractors" in our press -- which sounds like such an up-and-up, modest, business-like thing to be -- even when they're heavily armed and out in the field fighting Iraqis. Of course, the basic "gap" here lies in the very word "security." You simply can't have a more "secure" world in which such firms can freely make multimillions of dollars by hiring out to the highest -- and most powerful -- bidders.

In Iraq, this new "security" business has already reached monumental proportions. Looking at the military situation there logically, as Paul Rogers, the sober geopolitical analyst for the openDemocracy website, recently did (A strategy disintegrates), you can see why. Though we now have perhaps 135,000 American troops in Iraq, "what has to be remembered is that a large proportion of [them]… are reservists working on a wide range of projects. The core group of perhaps 80,000 combat troops is far too small to secure Iraq even if it were aided by effective Iraqi forces, and these are simply not there."

As it stands, reports Brendan O'Neill at the Alternet website (Outsourcing the Occupation), American troop strength is so low that most Iraqis -- 77% by one poll -- have never had an encounter with a member of the occupation forces. (This reflects as well the strain of the Pentagon's being committed to an ever greater global imperial mission with ever smaller military forces -- since so much of the Pentagon's budget actually goes into the creation of a vast array of 21st and 22nd century high-tech weapons and into the "pockets" of the megacorporations that create them.) As a result, in places like Najaf, it's been the "contractors," often brutal forces under no legal constraints or oversight in a land of which they know nothing, who have been left in small numbers to man the battlements.

The men of Blackwater and Custer Battles now find themselves at war and, as O'Neill reports, often can't even call on the U.S. military for backup when attacked. As a result, the various, otherwise competitive private outfits in Iraq are beginning to band together -- with their own helicopter support teams and their own intelligence -- to defend themselves more effectively. The Bush administration has for months now been hyping the infiltration of dangerous and unscrupulous "foreign fighters" into Iraq. As it happens they've been right. According to Brookings Institute expert Peter W. Singer, "We're talking somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 private personnel, and that is expected to rise to 30,000 when the coalition hands over power to Iraqis on 30 June." These men, living in their own Wild West, are, for some Iraqis, "the most hated and humiliating aspect" of an occupation which probably couldn't continue without them.

As the different "security contractors" mesh more closely with each other, they are, in a sense, becoming the real "coalition" in Iraq -- in conjunction of course with the American military. Here is how David Barstow described the situation in a recent front-page piece in the New York Times (Security Companies: Shadow Soldiers in Iraq):

"They have come from all corners of the world. Former Navy Seal commandos from North Carolina. Gurkas from Nepal. Soldiers from South Africa's old apartheid government. They have come by the thousands, drawn to the dozens of private security companies that have set up shop in Baghdad. The most prized were plucked from the world's elite special forces units. Others may have been recruited from the local SWAT team.

"But they are there, racing about Iraq in armored cars, many outfitted with the latest in high-end combat weapons. Some security companies have formed their own 'Quick Reaction Forces,' and their own intelligence units that produce daily intelligence briefs with grid maps of 'hot zones.' One company has its own helicopters, and several have even forged diplomatic alliances with local clans… With every week of insurgency in a war zone with no front, these companies are becoming more deeply enmeshed in combat, in some cases all but obliterating distinctions between professional troops and private commandos."

In this, Iraq is leading the way into a new world of war-fighting that places not security by pell-mell "insecurity" and -- since such mercenaries are, in the end, answerable to no one -- complete impunity at the heart of the Bush administration's new global order.

"Coalition": It's in this context that the continued use of the term "coalition" should obviously be reconsidered. The term has been an endlessly used -- and rarely challenged -- cover for Bush administration go-it-alone-ism. From the beginning, of course, the formation of the "coalition" -- against the desires of popular majorities in almost every one of the joining states -- involved major arm-twisting and/or large-scale bribery of a sort that has been as striking as it's been under-reported. Most members of the coalition, ranging from Poland to El Salvador, seem to have received some financial support from us for their "contributions" and were generally using their troops as pawns in bargaining for advantageous terms from the U.S. in other areas entirely; or were currying favor with the Bush administration in hopes of other kinds of help (as the South Korean government was in order to ameliorate the American negotiating stance toward North Korea); or were hoping to get cut in on lucrative "reconstruction" deals (almost all of which went to American firms anyway); or, in the case of Japan, was using Iraq to break the "peace constitution" that came out of the post-World War II American occupation of that country.

Almost all of these countries sent minimal numbers of troops, often of a relatively peaceful type (say, engineering forces), and in many cases only to engage in peacekeeping work, not to fight a war. Now, these countries are starting to fall away. This week Spain, Honduras and the Dominican Republic announced that they would withdraw their troops; the South Koreans hesitated over their promise to send another 3,500 troops, while Polish officialdom faltered slightly in its commitment; the Thais, who are reconsidering their commitment, asked for U.S. troops to "protect" their 400 troops in Karbala; and so on. Only Britain indicated that it might send more troops, while the European Union's top diplomat, Javier Solano, ruled out any NATO role there in the near future. This is obviously part of a process of delamination which could sooner or later reduce the "coalition" largely to the Americans, the mercenaries, and the Brits (in that order) -- which is generally the truth of the matter anyway. What should the term for the "coalition" be then?

"Sovereignty": The Bush administration has been touting the July 1 "hand-over" of "sovereignty" to some as-yet-unknown Iraqi administrative body for many months. "Sovereignty" is usually defined as "complete independence and self-government" or "supremacy of authority or rule as exercised by a sovereign or sovereign state." It's a term that high administration officials from the President on down seem to bring up almost daily in public briefings of every sort in Washington and Baghdad. It's often referred to as putting an "Iraqi face" (read: mask) on occupied Iraq.

Friday, the lead paragraph of a front-page New York Times piece by Steven R. Weisman with the modest title, White House Says Iraq Sovereignty Could Be Limited, was:

"The Bush administration's plans for a new caretaker government in Iraq would place severe limits on its sovereignty, including only partial command over its armed forces and no authority to enact new laws, administration officials said Thursday."

In fact, the Iraqi army, such as it is, will not be under Iraqi command; an American military army of occupation will remain, ensconced in permanent bases; the privatized economy will be beyond the reach of the new "supreme" body; and L. Paul Bremer has nailed in place a whole untouchable infrastructure that the new body will be able to do nothing about -- so just remind me under these circumstances, what exactly does "sovereignty" mean and why does our media continue to use the term?

Several weeks ago, Jonathan Schell, on a panel at a conference on covering the Iraq war at the Journalism School of the University of California at Berkeley, suggested that not only do the Americans have no intention of turning actual sovereignty over to the Iraqis but that, in fact, they do not possess sovereignty in Iraq and so, in a sense, have nothing not to turn over. How true that is likely to prove.

"Democracy": We entered Iraq to bring "democracy" to an oppressed and tyrannized people -- so this administration said over and over again (particularly as other explanations for our invasion slowly peeled away). But, as with sovereignty above, our administrators and the men they report back to in Washington have had a very specific definition of "democracy," one you're not likely to find in any dictionary -- and it's had nothing whatsoever to do with "elections" or "the will of the people." It's had to do with maneuvering to get Iraqis of our choice, mainly exiles, preferably led by Ahmed Chalabi into whatever passed for control in Iraq.

In recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq, historian Juan Cole offered the following as part of his testimony on U.S. Mistakes in Iraq:

"One strategy that might have forestalled a lot of opposition would have been to hold early municipal elections. Such free and fair elections were actually scheduled in cities like Najaf by local US military authorities in spring of 2003, but Paul Bremer stepped in to cancel them. A raft of newly elected mayors who subsequently gained experience in domestic politics might have thrown up new leaders in Iraq who could then move to the national stage. This development appears to have been deliberately forestalled by Mr. Bremer, in favor of a kind of cronyism that aimed at putting a preselected group of politicians in power. In Najaf, the US appointed a Sunni Baathist officer as mayor over this devotedly Shiite city. He had turned on Saddam only at the last moment. Since Sunni Baathists had massacred the people of Najaf, he was extremely unpopular. He took the children of Najaf notables hostage for ransom and engaged in other corrupt practices. Eventually even the US authorities had to remove him from power and try him. But the first impression the US made on the holy city of Najaf, and therefore on the high Shiite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, was very bad."

The same might be said more generally of nationwide elections. Month after month, the Americans resisted Ayatollah Sistani's insistence that national elections be organized quickly, well before the November American presidential election. They resisted for so long, in fact, that their argument -- it was impracticable -- finally came true. Now under ludicrously worse conditions, they will turn over only, it seems, the supposed power to organize national elections within seven months to whatever new body is decided upon -- a body guaranteed to be seen by many or most Iraqis as without legitimacy. In the meantime, the Americans will remain an occupying force, at least theoretically in control of more or less everything. What do we call this?

Iraq today

"Insecurity": The essence of Iraq today might be summed up in the word "insecurity." The continued employment of brute force by the Americans -- the decision as in Fallujah to, in the words of a British officer in Basra, use "a sledgehammer to crack a walnut" -- has evidently turned even the merchants on the commercial Boulevard of Outer Karada in middle-class Baghdad, who should be America's staunchest allies, against us. Edward Wong of the New York Times writes that these merchants tend to feel that "the fighting in Falluja had proven the occupiers to be barbarians" (Battle for Falluja Rouses the Anger of Iraqis Weary of the U.S. Occupation):

"'Frankly, we started to hate the Americans for that,' Towfeek Hussein, 36, an electronics salesman, said of the siege of Falluja as he sat behind a desk in his shop. 'The Americans will hit any family. They just don't care. Children used to wave to the American soldiers when their patrols passed by here. Two days ago, the children turned their faces away.'

"More than anything else, Falluja has become a galvanizing battle, a symbol around which many Iraqis rally their anticolonial sentiments. Some say the fighting there exposes the lie of American justice by showing that the world's sole superpower is ready to avenge the killings and mutilation of four American security contractors by sending marines to shell and invade a city of 300,000 people… The gap between the expectations of many Iraqis and the flagging abilities of the occupiers to improve conditions seems to have widened to a chasm."

At the Mother Jones on-line website, Nir Rosen writes of life in Baghdad this way in a piece that describes the assassination of a Iraqi police colonel in broad daylight on a major thoroughfare (Everyday Chaos):

"And the attacks are everywhere in Baghdad. The violence is relentless. You will never hear about most of it, because the American reporters here don't hear about most of it. Baghdad is a huge sprawling city with a barely functional communications infrastructure, and it's impossible for the journalists or the occupying army to know what is happening everywhere. We only hear the distant thunder of the explosions.

"All day and all night, Baghdad shakes with explosions; explosions from bombs, from rocket-propelled grenades, from artillery, from guns. But it's usually impossible to figure out just where the firing is taking place, even if you're foolish enough to search for the fighting after dark, when gangs and feral dogs own the streets. There are systematic assassinations of policemen, translators, local officials, and anybody associated with the American occupiers. In the Sunni neighborhood of Aadhamiya, the Americans come under attack on a nightly basis, and the streets erupt in cheers and whistles at the sounds of the first explosions. Most of the time, the Americans stay behind their concrete walls and big guns. But the Iraqi police have only handguns and a few AK-47's to use against a foe armed with car bombs and heavy weaponry. So the new Iraqi police are hunted at all times in all places, and they are losing every day. The pace of the violence has become so constant, it's almost normal, almost mundane."

This is not quite the Iraq we usually read much about.

In the meantime, just to offer a list of recent events in that unraveling country in no particular order: Major highways into and out of Baghdad have been shut down due to constant guerrilla attacks, with the dangers of shortages rising; 1,500 foreign engineers have reportedly fled the country so far; reporters largely don't dare to leave Baghdad, and often not even their hotels for fear of kidnapping or death; the BBC is reducing its staff in the country to barebones; the police and civil defense forces as well as the new army largely refused to fight in recent weeks and, according to American Major General Martin Dempsey, about 10% of them simply went over to rebels; some reconstruction projects have halted entirely and large contractors are beginning to either shut down, suspend work in the country, or withdraw workers -- GE and Siemens did so the other day, slowing work in particular on the countries power/electricity output as another hot summer with limited lights and air-conditioning looms; some of Saddam's former generals are being dusted off, as de-Baathification is chucked out the window, and put in charge of the "new" Iraqi army, while in Kut, the police chief and his deputy have been replaced with two of Saddam's former Republican Guards; kidnappings of foreigners continue apace as do targeted assassinations of translators, policemen, anyone working with the Americans; shootings of people who look "non-Arab, whether Western, Asian, or African are becoming routine"; at a desert camp in southern Iraq, American troops sleep in their trucks and Humvees because Iraqi merchants are afraid to deliver tents to them, while goods pile up at Baghdad Airport because Iraqi truckers refuse to drive the main highway to the capital or drive supplies to U.S. bases; suicide bombers hit Basra devastatingly last week as, on Saturday, suicide boats went after oil facilities in Basra harbor, and that seems to be but a beginning to such a list.

Finally, I recommend a piece first spotted by the editors of Antiwar.com from Army News Service about a squad of puzzled soldiers bringing "democracy" to Iraq by tearing down posters of the radical Shiite cleric al-Sadr in the shops of a Baghdad neighborhood and causing a near riot. It ends on the following paragraph -- a quote from the captain who ordered the posters torn down -- worthy, I suspect, of The Onion, rather than the Army News Service:

"I think it was important [to remove the posters] because al-Sadr currently stands for all things that are anti-coalition… It's important to show that we can deal with the propaganda in a non-threatening way, rather than coming in hard and forcefully."

"Escalation": Here's an old Vietnam-era term that might prove modestly useful in the new Iraq.

Troops: Our military forces in Iraq are now at 135,000 and General Abizaid, Centcom commander, is considering asking for more. The British are also evidently planning to send in another 1,700 troops and possibly expand their area of operations, and private "security firms" may add up to 10,000 more well-paid mercenaries, bringing their numbers to 30,000. In the meantime, the President is evidently on the verge of deciding to order the Marines to take Fallujah, no matter whether it becomes an Iraqi "Alamo" or not. This is unsurprising. For the men (and woman) of this administration, brute force and the threat of force is the only option they really know. It is, in fact, option A, B, and C. They really have nothing else in their arsenal and frustration has set in.

Funds: It's no shock to discover, given the last weeks in Iraq, that funds are running short. The Bush administration has been reluctant -- for obvious reasons -- to ask Congress to appropriate more money before the November election. (Why tell the American people what the ever-growing price tag is on "their" occupation?) Still just this week, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers told Congress that the military part of the occupation, already costing $4.7 billion a month, was about to experience a $4 billion "shortfall" by late this summer. This would include the $700 million dollars needed to keep those 20,000 extra troops in Iraq for three more months and the higher fuel costs the military is paying due, in part, to OPEC/Saudi oil production cuts.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the general's figure doesn't seem to cover the half of it. The Army alone has "identified" $6 billion "in funding needs that were not addressed in the defense budget" including funds for repairing worn and destroyed equipment in Iraq, adding heavy armor to vehicles, buying combat helmets, boots, underwear, and so on.

The Marines, Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post reports, have their own list of unmet needs including $40 million for body army, lightweight helmets and other equipment. His piece includes the following curious passage:

"Scrambling to fill its needs, the Pentagon last week diverted 120 armored Humvees purchased by the Israel Defense Forces to Iraq. Yesterday, the Army announced a $110 million contract for still more armored Humvees."

How the $4 billion "shortfall" and the $6 billion-plus-plus in unmet needs mesh -- is the $4 billion included in the $6 billion figure? -- I have no idea. But I think you can count on the fact that from here on, funds for the occupation are only going to escalate.

Detainees: And, oh yes, in the escalatory realm, Aaron Glantz of Inter Press Service reports far higher figures for Iraqi detainees than I've previously seen. He writes: "The U.S. military is currently holding more than 20,000 Iraqis behind bars -- most of them taken during house to house searches by the U.S. military." Maybe we could just imprison the whole population and be done with it.

"Reconstruction": There has been endless talk about "reconstructing" Iraq. It's what we're there for, aren't we? But what exactly is this "reconstruction." Here's one thing we now know: perhaps 20-25% of all reconstruction monies going into corporate hands are being spent on "security" -- think "insecurity" -- in Iraq.

Now, we have another figure to go with that. According to Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor in a piece entitled, Operation kickback?:

"Iraq's private companies routinely pay bribes to get reconstruction contracts - often to Iraqi officials but sometimes to employees of US contractors. That's one of the allegations that has been made by a special investigation undertaken by public radio's Marketplace and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and funded by The Economist magazine. The result, according to experts monitoring the situation, is almost 20 percent of the billions of American taxpayers dollars being spent to rebuild Iraq is being lost to corruption."

He adds that "every Iraqi ministry is touched by corruption, the report alleges" and that "the problem is as deeply embedded in Washington as it is in Baghdad… in the past three months, US investigators have disputed more than $1 billion worth of contract fees because of 'inflated charges, incompetence, lack of documentation to support invoices and kickbacks related to subcontract awards.'"

Now, add to the moneys being poured into security and being siphoned off by corruption, the unknown percentage of reconstruction funds that are simply and legally pocketed by large corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton as profits for their work and you have to wonder exactly how much of these Iraqi-bound, congressionally-mandated funds actually make it anywhere near any reasonable group of Iraqis. I mean, we may be talking about one of the great scams of history here, the sort of thing that could make Teapot Dome seem like a sprinkle on a spring day and, given all this, should we still really be talking about "reconstructing" Iraq?

And then we need some term to cover whatever the downward spiraling process is that we're watching (and the Iraqis are experiencing). We could, of course, just turn the term "reconstruction" upside down and talk about the "deconstruction" of Iraq, intended or otherwise, but perhaps the term "devolution" would better fit the larger situation -- and our world itself.

The question that lies under all this language, somewhere beneath the gap between our description of reality and what's going on out there, beneath the new word and world order, somewhere deep in that dark abyss, is whether, as Paul Rogers of openDemocracy puts the matter, the U.S. situation in Iraq is "actually becoming unsustainable." Put another way, whatever the immediate profits and advantages, even to the Bush administration, is such a world unsustainable?

What, I wonder, will this administration do, to take but a simple example, if fighting boils up again in the land that time forgot -- Afghanistan -- now seemingly covered with opium poppies, in a state of remarkable disarray, still filled with warlords, and with a resurgent Taliban? Just the other day a story from that land broke through to Americans because an American soldier killed in an ambush there happened to be a former National Football League player who had walked away from multimillions to become a member of the Army Rangers.

We know that George Bush imagines himself striding into town as The Law in a western; but, wedded to the gun as he is, the ranks of his supporters filling with mercenaries as they are, what he seems to be intent on creating is a spaghetti-western world -- and, given his corporate cronies, A Fistful of Dollars wouldn't be a bad title for his "film," which unfortunately also happens to be our world.

A private sector lawyer who gave legal advice to the Government on the invasion of Iraq has received more than £50,000 of public money for his opinion.

Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, turned to Professor Christopher Greenwood QC, a supporter of military intervention for humanitarian purposes, in the run-up to the war in Iraq two years ago.

Professor Greenwood's opinion contradicted much of the advice Lord Goldsmith was receiving from the Foreign Office, where there were doubts about justifying military action on the basis of UN resolution 1441. He is understood to have argued that the two original resolutions passed against Saddam Hussein after the Kuwait war of 1990 provided a basis for action, an assessment that critics said was a minority legal view.

The payment was disclosed in a written Lords reply last night by Lord Goldsmith, who stressed Professor Greenwood, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, was not asked to assess the legality of invasion.

But Sir Menzies Campbell, deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats, said: "Even by the lucrative standards of the Bar, this suggests more than a passing involvement in the giving of advice to the Attorney General. Once again it raises the extent to which the Attorney General's advice was his own.

"Professor Greenwood's sincerely held view was that military action was legal - the amount he received suggests the Attorney General relied to a very considerable extent on him."

In his written reply, Lord Goldsmith said Professor Greenwood was first "instructed" on 13 March, 2003, which was four days before the Attorney General summarised his own views on the legality of the action. The professor had been instructed on "a number of occasions by government departments in relation to a variety of different legal issues relating to the conflict and its aftermath", he said.

Professor Greenwood is currently acting for the Ministry of Defence in an Appeal Court case concerning civilian deaths in Iraq, Lord Goldsmith added.

"The best information that can be obtained is that, as at 21 March 2005 [yesterday], his professional fees in relation to work connected with the conflict in Iraq amounted to approximately £46,000 (excluding VAT)," Lord Goldsmith added.

During the same period, Professor Greenwood had been paid approximately £53,000 (excluding VAT) for other Government work, unrelated to the Iraq conflict. That included work for the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Home Office, and the Cabinet Office.

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.

But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".

Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.

"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."

Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.

Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".

The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".

Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.

The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.

Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.

Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.

"I think Perle's statement has the virtue of honesty," said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.

"And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along."

The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.

Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.

The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was "very sensitive" to British sentiment. "We also expect to be resolving this in the near future," he told the BBC.

GEORGE Bush’s former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill has revealed that the President took office in January 2001 fully intending to invade Iraq and desperate to find an excuse for pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein.
O’Neill’s claims tally with long-running investigations by the Sunday Herald which have shown how the Bush cabinet planned a pre- meditated attack on Iraq in order to “regime change” Saddam long before the neoconservative Republicans took power.

The Sunday Herald previously uncovered how a think-tank – run by vice-president Dick Cheney; defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld; Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy; Bush’s younger brother Jeb, the governor of Florida; and Lewis Libby, Cheney’s deputy – wrote a blueprint for regime change as early as September 2000.

The think-tank, the Project for the New American Century, said, in the document Rebuilding America’s Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century, that: “The United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein”.

The document – referred to as a blueprint for US global domination – laid plans for a Bush government “maintaining US global pre- eminence, precluding the rise of a great-power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests”. It also said fighting and winning multiple wars was a “core mission”.

O’Neill was fired in December 2002 as a result of disagreements over tax cuts. He is the first major Bush administration insider to attack the President. He likened Bush at cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people”, according to excerpts from a CBS interview to be shown today.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”

O’Neill and other White House insiders have given the journalist Ron Suskind documents for a new book, The Price Of Loyalty, revealing that as early as the first three months of 2001 the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein.

“There are memos,” Suskind told CBS. “One of them marked ‘secret’ says ‘Plan for Post- Saddam Iraq’.”

Another Pentagon document entitled Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oil Field Contracts talks about contractors from 40 countries and which ones have interests in Iraq.

O’Neill is also quoted in the new book saying the President was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

“It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it,” said O’Neill. “The President saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”

White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected O’Neill’s remarks. He said: “We appreciate his service. While we’re not in the business of doing book reviews, it appears that the world according to Mr O’Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people.”

British prime minister Tony Blair has long known that the controversy surrounding the war on Iraq and his unbending support for the US-led campaign was not about to go away.

Each time he suggests the time has come to draw a line under the rows and divisions it caused, both domestically and internationally, something new emerges to push the entire issue back onto the front pages.

His best hope is that any political damage has already been done and that, with a British general election probably only six weeks away, most voters have now made up their minds on the issue - one way or another.

But his position will not have been helped by a trio of new, war-related developments.

First, his Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has finally published the government's response to an independent inquiry carried out into the intelligence provided in the run up to the war.

And he announced new safeguards to prevent a repeat of the intelligence failings and to tighten the procedures ministers use to handle such information.

Military action

Secondly, the influential defence committee of British MPs has re-opened the argument over the US-UK coalition's allegedly inadequate planning for the post-war phase in Iraq.

The MPs highlighted the coalition's failure to grasp the likely scale of the insurgency or the sense of local resentment at perceived "cultural and economic imperialism" that may follow the occupation.

Finally - and potentially the most dangerous for Tony Blair - there has been fresh evidence that UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith may have changed his mind and declared the war legal at the last moment only, it is claimed, after it became clear the coalition would not win a second UN resolution to support military action.

That has brought renewed demands from opposition parties and critical Labour MPs for the government to publish Lord Goldsmith's original legal opinion said to cast doubt over the legality of war, and for an explanation of why he changed his mind.

Lord Goldsmith has long insisted that the final advice he gave just before the conflict was his independent and genuinely held view that military action would be legal.

And the foreign secretary, speaking in an emergency debate in the Commons, again insisted the government had no intention of breaking precedent and publishing his advice.

And he repeated the established line that the independent advice from the attorney general was the war was legal.

But the pressure just keeps on building, with the latest revelation coming in a previously censored resignation letter from a foreign office lawyer who quit her job in the belief the war was illegal.

Serious allegation

That has now led to claims of a government cover up, with former British ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook - who both also resigned over the war - stepping up their attacks on the government.

However, there remains a significant problem for those demanding explanations about the attorney general's perceived change of opinion.

The implication is that he was persuaded by the prime minister or those around him to alter his advice when it became clear there would be no UN sanction for war.

That is about as serious an allegation as can be made and, if ever proven, would be devastating for the prime minister.

But without some further clear, unambiguous evidence that was the case, the critics' argument still relies on either circumstantial evidence of speculation over motives.

The British government shows absolutely no sign of being ready to offer any further details on this issue and divining precisely what was in the attorney general's mind presents a serious challenge.

And it must remain Tony Blair's hope that the looming election campaign will focus on other domestic issues and that the Iraq controversy will be a secondary affair.

None the less, this has still been by far the greatest crisis to buffet the government and the prime minister in particular and it will cast a long shadow over that campaign.

And, of course, the opposition parties and some Labour MPs are not about to stop gnawing away at this bone.

The attorney general has been drawn into a fresh row over whether he dropped earlier objections in order to authorise the war with Iraq.

Lord Goldsmith has been at the centre of a continuing row over the nature of his legal opinion justifying the use of force.

Renewed speculation followed the release, under the Freedom of Information Act, of the resignation letter of the Foreign Office's deputy legal adviser.

Elizabeth Wilmshurst, in her letter of March 18, 2003, wrote of a possible war that "an unlawful use of force on such a scale amounts to the crime of aggression".

However, one paragraph of the letter was blacked out prior to its release to news organisations.

Channel 4 News said the missing section read: "My views accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office, before and after the adoption of UN security council resolution 1441.

"And with what the attorney general gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7th of March.

"The view expressed in that letter has of course changed again into what is now the official line."

The letter appears to confirm previous reports that as late as March 7, 2003 Lord Goldsmith was of the belief that war would be illegal.

However, on March 17 he issued a written statement setting out a legal basis for the war.

'Damning evidence'
Shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram said ministers were "trying to save their own skin and I think they have scored an enormous own goal".

"What they have done is not to decrease the amount of doubt and mistrust that there is about the way that the government handled the run-up to the Iraq war, but actually increased it.

"This is damning evidence, unless it is explained."

"If there was a reason why the attorney general changed his mind between March 7 and March 17, then we should be told about it.

"What is happening at the moment is that the government is trying desperately to cover its tracks."

Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman Sir Menzies Campbell also told Channel 4 News that a section of the resignation letter had been blacked out "not in the public interest, but in the government interest".

"The government is severely embarrassed by the fact that there is continuing controversy about the legal advice given by the attorney general and the way in which he arrived at his final opinion," he added.

'Clear views'
Speaking on Wednesday night, a spokesman for the attorney general said Lord Goldsmith had made clear that the decision on the legality of the war was made independently.

And the Foreign Office said the missing paragraph from the resignation letter had been legitimately withheld.

"Elizabeth Wilmshurst's resignation minute was disclosed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office today under the Freedom of Information Act," the department said in a statement.

"Two sentences were redacted by the FCO from the document because their content related to the provision of legal advice in relation to the use of force against Iraq.

"Regardless of whether these references were accurate, this information was therefore covered by exemptions in the Act which apply to confidential legal advice, sections 42(1) and 35(1)(c) of the Act, and the formation or development of government policy, section 35(1)(a)."

Key points
• Government announces intelligence services reforms after Iraq WMD fiasco
• Agents and analysts to get 'whistleblower' rules to raise intelligence doubts
• Confidential ministerial guidebook cautions on treatment of intelligence

Key quote
"A picture that is drawn solely from secret intelligence will almost certainly be a more uncertain picture than one which incorporates other sources of information" - Ministerial and civil service guidebook

Story in full BRITAIN should never again go to war solely on the reports of the secret services, the government admitted yesterday in a comprehensive intelligence shake-up.

New rules to ensure ministers always treat the reports of MI6 and other agencies with caution are at the centre of the reforms brought about by the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction fiasco.

New jobs and structures for the spies themselves are also intended to embed scepticism about the reliability and value of intelligence reports in the heart of Whitehall.

The changes announced by the Foreign Office amount to a tacit admission that Tony Blair and other ministers did not do enough to question the reports that led the Prime Minister to state "beyond doubt" that Iraq had WMDs.

As well as new orders to ministers to put less trust in intelligence reports, there will be more assessment staff charged with examining and challenging the validity of data, providing a second opinion on potentially influential information.

The Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which co-ordinates the reports of intelligence agencies, produced the Prime Minister’s infamous dossier stating Saddam Hussein had amassed a WMD arsenal. Now the JIC’s rules for double-checking and testing its own conclusions have been "tightened up".

Intelligence agents and analysts are also to get new "whistleblower" rules allowing them to raise doubts about their superiors’ conclusions. The Hutton Inquiry in 2003 revealed that members of the Defence Intelligence Staff had grave doubts about some MI6 reports about Iraq’s chemical weapons capability, but their concerns were not taken up.

The most significant aspect of yesterday’s reforms is a new confidential guidebook issued to the politicians and civil servants who receive the reports of the intelligence services. It gives a stern warning that readers cannot treat the services’ reports as definitive: "Intelligence seldom acquires the full story."

"A picture that is drawn solely from secret intelligence will almost certainly be a more uncertain picture than one which incorporates other sources of information," the guide warns.

Yesterday’s changes were triggered by Lord Butler’s investigation into pre-war intelligence. As well as finding fundamental errors in the intelligence agencies’ assessment of their Iraqi sources, Lord Butler also savaged Mr Blair’s style of government in which pre-war meetings were informal gatherings without minutes being taken.

Downing Street last night said that has now changed: "We will do it as suggested by Lord Butler."

Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said: "We have to rely on the competence of the people involved and the integrity of the system. These reforms will only be of any value if they enhance both of these."

ATTORNEY GENERAL'S DOUBTS

THE legality of invading Iraq was under scrutiny again last night, with claims Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, changed his mind days before the war began.

A resignation letter from the former Foreign Office legal adviser Elizabeth Wilmshurst, who quit on 18 March, 2003, revealed that on 7 March, 2003, Lord Goldsmith had told the Foreign Office of doubts over the war’s legality.

"The view expressed in that letter has of course changed again into what is now the official line," Ms Wilmshurst wrote.

Foreign Office official's resignation letter reveals that Attorney General did change his mind on legality of Iraq war

Documentary evidence has emerged showing that the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, changed his mind about the legality of the Iraq war just before the conflict began. The damning revelation is contained in the resignation letter of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a legal adviser at the Foreign Office, in which she said the war would be a "crime of aggression". She quit the day after Lord Goldsmith's ruling was made public, three days before the war began in March 2003.

The critical paragraph of her letter, published yesterday under the Freedom of Information Act, was blanked out by the Government on the grounds that it was in the public interest to protect the privacy of the advice given by the Attorney General. But last night the contents of the paragraph were leaked, and Tony Blair was facing fresh allegations of a cover-up. There has long been speculation that Lord Goldsmith was leant on to switch his view, and to sanction the war - and confirmation of that would be devastating for the Prime Minister. The Wilmhurst letter stops short of explaining what caused Lord Goldsmith to change his mind.

The revelations come two weeks after it emerged that there had never been a detailed dossier from the Attorney General setting out the case for military action before troops were committed, and that Britain went to war on the basis of nine paragraphs on a single sheet of A4 paper.

Last night's revelations - broadcast on Channel 4 News - showed that Ms Wilmshurst said the Attorney General had initially agreed with the Foreign Office legal team that a war on Iraq would be illegal without a second UN resolution.

In the blanked-out paragraph from her letter of resignation on 18 March 2003, she wrote: "My views accord with the advice that has been given consistently in this office before and after the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1441 and with what the Attorney General gave us to understand was his view prior to his letter of 7 March. (The view expressed in that letter has of course changed again into what is now the official line)."

The revelations were seized upon by critics of the Iraq conflict. Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said: "The Government blacked out that section not in the public interest but in the government interest. The Government is severely embarrassed by the fact that there is continuing controversy about the legal advice given by the Attorney General and the way in which he arrived at his final opinion."

Clare Short, who resigned from the Cabinet after the invasion, said last night: "I think the Government had to try and cover it up because it's so devastating. The bit that was blocked out shows that the Attorney General changed his mind twice in a matter of days before he gave his advice to the Cabinet when he just said, unequivocally, 'My view is the legal authority for war' and kept from the Cabinet any suggestion that he had had doubts about it." She added: "I didn't think there was anything left that would shock me but to have that in black and white and to know that is what he did is really shocking. He said he wasn't leant on, but he certainly turned head over heels a couple of times."

As efforts to get a second UN resolution were stalling in the approach to the 2003 conflict, Lord Goldsmith produced a lengthy legal opinion arguing that a case could be made for war without a second UN resolution, but it could be open to legal challenge.

On 13 March, he told ministers that war without a UN second resolution was legal. But there have been claims that six days earlier, on 7 March, he presented Tony Blair with a legal opinion in which he warned that military action could be challenged in the courts.

The emergence of Ms Wilms-hurst's allegation is likely to prove to be embarrassing for ministers in the run-up to an expected general election in May.

The Commons is due to rise today for the Easter recess and Mr Blair is due to go to Buckingham Palace to ask for the dissolution of Parliament as soon as MPs finish their holiday, around 4 or 5 April, clearing the way for a general election on 5 May. However, the fresh evidence is certain to lead to calls for Mr Blair and the Attorney General to answer the claims that they have sought to cover up the most damaging claim - that they took Britain to war knowing it to be illegal.

The controversy wrecked an attempt yesterday by Mr Blair to limit the damage from the war in the general election campaign. The Government announced changes to Mr Blair's "sofa style" of government which was heavily criticised in the Butler inquiry into the intelligence failures on the Iraq war and the weapons of mass destruction.

Mr Blair unveiled a series of new intelligence safeguards which are being put in place following the intelligence failures that led Britain to go to war on a false prospectus. But many of the changes were attacked as "too little, too late" by the Government's critics. Intelligence officers were sceptical that Mr Blair would be able to change his style of "government by sofa", based on informal meetings without records being kept.

Labour strategists are hoping that the damage to trust in Mr Blair can be repaired in time to stop the memory of the Iraq war driving Labour voters into the arms of the Liberal Democrats in Labour marginal seats in the general election.

Accepting the recommendations of the Butler report, Mr Blair promised there would be no more ad-hoc meetings with ministers and officials. They will be replaced by proper meetings with notes taken and records kept in the future. Ministers are also to be given a guide on how to assess intelligence, including information on the limitations of reports.If ministers had known the "45-minute" claim had come from an uncorroborated single source, it may not have got into the dossier published in September 2002.

The Prime Minister has also accepted the recommendation that a senior intelligence officer should chair the Joint Intelligence Committee, overseeing reports to ministers, at the end of his or her career. It amounts to a rebuke for Mr Blair, who promoted John Scarlett, the former head of the JIC who approved the "dodgy dossier", to be the head of MI6.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER: AN 'EXCELLENT AND ABLE' LAWYER

For nearly three decades, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, worked diligently and competently in the legal department of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

She became a civil servant in the department in her mid-twenties and colleagues described her as an "excellent and able" lawyer, with a notably steady character.

Her efforts and expertise in international law were rewarded in 1997 when she was promoted to the position of deputy head of legal affairs for the FCO. The promotion cemented her position as one of Britain's leading experts on international criminal and diplomatic law. The next year, she received further recognition - she was made a Companion of St Michael and St George, one of the highest honours for diplomats.

During her tenure, Ms Wilmshurst led the UK delegation to set up the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, served as legal counsellor to the UK's mission to the UN, and gave evidence for the Foreign Office to the House of Commons International Development Committee on the legality of sanctions.

However, as her resignation letter has revealed, she was as impassioned a defender of her beliefs as she was knowledgeable and successful in her arena.

She resigned in March 2003 after defying her political superiors in the Foreign Office by stating her belief that joining the US invasion of Iraq would constitute a violation of international law.

It was a move that would have considerable political reverberations as well as an impact on her professional position.

She was thought to have been prepared to appear as a witness for Katharine Gun, the former GCHQ translator, who was to stand trial for leaking an e-mail concerning a UK-US spying operation. However, the case collapsed last year without her participation.

Ms Wilmshurst, 56, is now using her expertise as head of the international law programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the London think-tank at Chatham House. She is also a visiting professor at University College, London.

Her areas of international law expertise include the use of force, international criminal law and courts, the law of the United Nations and State and sovereign immunity.

The Government was today challenged to publish "the entire paper trail" of Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's advice to ministers that the war against Iraq was legal.

But Foreign Secretary Jack Straw turned down the demand from shadow attorney general Dominic Grieve, saying publishing such advice would have "very grave" implications for good government.

The Commons clash came as Mr Straw was forced to answer an urgent question from Mr Grieve following fresh controversy sparked by the release of the resignation letter of the Foreign Office's ex–deputy legal adviser who quit because she believed the conflict was illegal.

She said, in a part of her letter censored by the Government but leaked to Channel 4 News, that Lord Goldsmith had shared her view until March 7, 2003.

There are claims Lord Goldsmith then changed his view to saying the war would be legal, but open to challenge before finally declaring the conflict would be lawful under existing United Nations resolutions.

No 10 today repeated that the Attorney General had reached his view without being "leaned on".

Mr Grieve told MPs: "It would be far better if the entire paper trail were to be published to reassure the public the Attorney General was neither leant on to change his views for party political reasons, nor deceived by the Prime Minister on the facts on which war might be justified."

But Mr Straw said successive administrations had refused to publish the legal advice they received.

If that happened, he said, "the implications for good government are very grave indeed".

The Foreign Secretary said Lord Butler's inquiry into the use of intelligence in the run–up to war had seen Lord Goldsmith's advice.

"Lord Butler came to his conclusion that the Attorney General had given clear and categorical advice to the Cabinet that in his judgment it was lawful under (UN) resolution 1441 to use force without a further UN security council resolution."

Mr Straw said it was "entirely proper" to black out parts of Ms Wilmshurst's letter because "their content concerned the provision of legal advice in relation to the use of force against Iraq" regardless of whether those references were correct or not.

Shadow foreign secretary Michael Ancram said today: "The Government scored an enormous own goal by failing under the Freedom of Information Act to release the whole of Miss Wilmshurst's letter.

"When it first transpired that an extract had been held back for reasons of public interest, I think it was a fair presumption that it was because of national security."

Mr Ancram, speaking in Edinburgh during a one–day visit to Scotland, went on: "Now we know it was merely to cover up the fact that Lord Goldsmith changed his position on the legality of the war between March 7 and March 17."

He said: "What they have succeeded in doing was create a very embarrassing situation for themselves.

"They have left Lord Goldsmith in a very difficult position.

"It becomes even more imperative that they now come clean with all the information so that the doubts that exist in the public mind about how the Government handled matters in the run–up to the Iraq war can be clarified one way or the other."

Prime Minister Tony Blair's official spokesman said: "Lord Goldsmith stated his views as recently as March 1 this year in the House of Lords. It was that he reached his view independently, not as a result of being leaned on.

"We do not discuss the Attorney General's legal advice. That's in line with the practice of previous administrations."

Reg Keys, father of Tom Keys of the Royal Military Police, who was killed in Iraq in June 2003 said today: "As I waved my son Tom off to war I believed the credibility of this Government and the fact that this was a legal war.

"I now feel a man betrayed by his own Government and their legal advisers. My son now rests in his grave, his oath of allegiance betrayed. There has to be accountability for this disgraceful conduct by the Prime Minister and his associates.

"That is why I am going to stand in Sedgefield because Tony Blair has to be made to account for this war. The families have every right to see the full legal advice."

Rose Gentle, mother of fusilier Gordon Gentle killed in Iraq June 2004, said: "Tony Blair should be impeached for the lies he has told, he must be brought to court.

"We know there were no weapons of mass destruction, now we know there was no legal justification for the war either."

Elizabeth Wilmshurst's resignation letter provides the first glimpse from inside Whitehall of the Attorney General's apparent change of heart over the legality of the war.

Ms Wilmshurst disagreed fundamentally with the Attorney General that the invasion of Iraq would be legal under international law. Her resignation letter not only illustrates in stark terms the strength of her views, but, for the first time, highlights the Attorney General's change of opinion on the legality of invasion within the space of less than two weeks.

It could not come at a worse time for Tony Blair who has been trying to bury the issue before the general election. To many it will be seen as "the smoking gun", showing that the Attorney General did change his mind on the eve of war.

On 17 March, the Attorney General stated unequivocally that the use of force would be justified under international law. He set out his reasons in a one-page long parliamentary answer to MPs and peers

But only 10 days before, Lord Goldsmith produced a fuller document for Tony Blair in which he stopped short of giving a definitive view on whether war would be legal, and said it might be safer to secure a second UN resolution.

The Attorney General has always resolutely denied rumours he was leant on to change his mind. He has never discussed the process of how he came to the opinion he did but he has always insisted it was his "genuine and independent view."

What we do know is the Attorney General only ruled invasion would be legal after seeking an "unequivocal" statement from Tony Blair that Saddam Hussein had committed further breaches of UN resolutions. Mr Blair wrote to the Attorney General on 15 March saying it was his "unequivocal view that Iraq is in further material breach of its obligations."

Two days later Lord Goldsmith set out in a short parliamentary answer his case for the legality of the war.

In a further twist, only two weeks ago it emerged that, aside from his one-page reply to Parliament, there was no other formal advice from the Attorney General on the legality of war.

That admission, from the head of the home civil service Sir Andrew Turnbull, caused bafflement and bemusement. It prompted MPs to remark that Britain had invaded Iraq on the strength of a single piece of paper. Today's revelation demonstrates how divided the Government's own lawyers were on the issue.

The letter shows definitively that Elizabeth Wilmshurst was not the only Foreign Office lawyer to disagree that invading Iraq would be legal. Indeed she says that view was given "consistently" by her department.

Her views are shared by many international lawyers from around the world.

Ms Wilmshurst is now head of international law at the think tank Chatham House where she continues to look at Iraq, including the legality of the occupation.

She is careful with the words she uses and, since leaving Whitehall, she has been reticent about speaking publicly about the reasons for her resignation. Her letter demonstrates the battle she was having.

After Iraq, and with Darfur looming, the UN needs to develop clear guidelines on military intervention in the face of a humanitarian crisis

Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur? Does international law stand in the way of military intervention to stop humanitarian crises occurring or to bring them swiftly to an end?
The UN charter prohibits a state from using force in another country without the latter's consent. There are, however, two well-established exceptions: if force is used in self-defence, and if force is authorised by a security council resolution under chapter VII of the charter.

The security council may authorise military action only if the measure is necessary "to maintain or restore international peace and security". At first sight, a humanitarian crisis within a state's borders would not qualify. But on occasions the council has determined that there was a threat to the peace even if the situation was internal. In 1968, chapter VII was applied against the Ian Smith regime in what was then Southern Rhodesia. More recently, the council has adopted chapter VII resolutions for Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), Rwanda (1994) and eastern Zaire (1996) and has determined that widespread human rights abuses can amount to a threat to international peace (former Yugoslavia 1993, Rwanda 1994 and East Timor 1999).

But what if the security council, for whatever reason, does not adopt a resolution authorising military action, in the face of actual or impending disaster? May a state or a group of states lawfully use force within an unwilling state? The views of lawyers are divided. There is a tension between the rules in the charter, built on a world order that depends on the sovereignty of states, and the rights and needs of individuals. In the west, many believe that there is a legal right to use force in the most extreme cases of humanitarian need - or at least that the law is developing in that direction. It would be harder to find such a view among developing countries. Others consider that though an intervention would not be legal, it would be "legitimate". All these views were expressed after Nato countries intervened in Kosovo in 1999.

The British government's view was stated by Baroness Symons in a written answer in November 1998: "Cases have ... arisen (as in northern Iraq in 1991) when ... a limited use of force was justifiable in support of purposes laid down by the security council, but without the council's express authorisation, when that was the only means to avert an immediate ... humanitarian catastrophe. Such cases would ... be exceptional and would depend on an objective assessment of the factual circumstances at the time and on the terms of relevant decisions of the security council bearing on the situation in question."

This has the merit of underlining that force may be used only in exceptional circumstances; but it doesn't set out its arguments for departing from the UN charter.

The genocide convention is sometimes thought to give authority for states to intervene in other countries. It requires states to prevent and punish genocide. But that does not give the legal right to intervene militarily - states must call on the UN "to take appropriate action".

Regarding the Iraq conflict in 2003, it would not have been possible to claim that the intervention would have stopped imminent massacres, nor that force was the last reasonable option.

In the aftermath of Kosovo, a commission was set up to consider the whole question of humanitarian intervention. The Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty reported in 2001, and recommended the use of the term "responsibility to protect". This was intended to refocus the debate from the rights of states, to the interests of the victims, while recognising that the primary duty to protect rests on the state concerned.

The commission set out six criteria for military intervention for human protection purposes, building on the "just war" tradition. There must be just cause (a large-scale loss of life or large-scale atrocities such as ethnic cleansing). There must be the right intention (the primary purpose of the intervention must be to halt or avert human suffering). Force must be used only as the last resort. The means used must be proportionate (the minimum necessary). There must be reasonable prospects of success; force cannot be justified if it makes the situation worse.

The sixth criterion was that there must be "lawful authority". On the difficult question of whether force may lawfully be used in the absence of a security council resolution, the commission concluded, after extensive consultation round the world, that "as a matter of political reality, it would be impossible to find consensus ... around any set of proposals for military intervention which acknowledged the validity of any intervention not authorised by the security council or general assembly". But the commission warned that failure of the council to act when it ought to would pose a serious problem of credibility for the UN.

Within the UN, attempts have been made to negotiate a set of guidelines similar to those set out in the commission's report, but those efforts have failed so far. However, the African Union has as one of its principles its right to intervene in one of its member states where there are serious war crimes, genocide or crimes against humanity.

What should be the law? A doctrine of humanitarian intervention which leaves to individual states the judgment on the seriousness of human rights breaches is open to abuse. States might camouflage a political agenda behind arguments of humanitarian necessity. The concept of sovereignty is often presented as the obstacle to protection of human rights, but it may be the only protection that a state has against abuse of power by a stronger state. Collective intervention is more likely to be disinterested than single-country intervention.

This is a difficult area of law and of international relations. We must hope for wise recommendations from the UN high-level panel on threats, challenges and change set up by Kofi Annan in 2003, which is due to report in December.

· Elizabeth Wilmshurst was deputy legal advisor to the Foreign Office until her resignation in 2003 over the Iraq war, and is now head of the international law programme at Chatham House. This article will appear in the November issue of IDM: The International Development Magazine.

 ewilmshurst@chathamhouse.org.uk

Important new revelations have emerged on the legality of the war against Iraq which overthrew Saddam.

After months of calls from critics and lawyers alike for the government to publish its legal justification for war, Channel 4 News has now learned that the government's law officers never did write a formal unequivocal opinion in favour of military action.

The only formal advice that was given was equivocal, and when the attorney-general presented what was described as 'his view' to Parliament, it had in fact been set out by Number Ten.

Today, the attorney-general Lord Goldsmith insisted his statement to Parliament was his genuine view - it was 'nonsense' - he says - to suggest Number Ten had written it.

The attorney-general was refusing to answer questions today - but he faces new doubts about the integrity of his legal opinion on war on Iraq. The allegation is that he allowed political involvement in what's supposed to be a pure judicial decision.

Back in March 2003, the diplomatic process at the UN was near collapse. Tens of thousands of British Forces were massed on Iraq's border but the head of the armed forces said they would not fight unless he had unequivocal legal go-ahead from the attorney-general saying that the war was legal.

But two weeks before war the attorney-general's legal advice was still equivocal - Lord Goldsmith gave a lengthy written legal opinion to Tony Blair on March 7th that said war without a second UN resolution was open to legal challenge.

Channel 4 News has learnt that there was then considerable traffic between the attorney's office and Downing Street. In larger meetings, with the Prime Minister present and smaller ones - without civil servants, no notes were taken. We have discovered that the attorney-general's evidence to Lord Butler's inquiry to Iraq throws new light on the final meeting at Number 10.

Seven days before the outbreak of war, the attorney-general met with two of the Prime Minister’s oldest allies and most trusted political colleagues - Baroness Sally Morgan - who worked on political and party matters for the Prime Minister and Lord Falconer - who was then Home Office mInister responsible for criminal justice. The attorney-general told them that he had seen the light - war was indeed fully legal without a second resolution.

At one of his evidence sessions, we understand that Lord Butler asked about that meeting. Having changed his mind did Lord Goldsmith produce no further formal advice on Iraq? Lord Goldsmith did not dispute that.

He was asked if his meeting with Baroness Morgan and Lord Falconer was minuted - Lord Goldsmith said he was not sure. He said he had told them about his new view on legality. Lord Goldsmith said: “They shortly of course set out my view.”

Some critics of the war think that suggests that the final legal go-ahead for war may have been cooked up - maybe even written - inside Number 10.

Lord Goldsmith today said: "The parliamentary statement was genuinely my own view and I was not leaned on to give that view. It is nonsense to suggest that Number 10 wrote the statement."

But the attorney-general's evidence to Lord Butler appears to suggest outsiders set out his views for him. It certainly shows that he discussed his legal opinion, which is supposed to be above politics and drawn from Whitehall's own legal advisers, with some highly political people. One former attorney-general told us he would be "horrified" at such a thought.

A former government legal adviser said he was baffled why the attorney-general - having changed his mind and decided war was legal, never wrote down a full traditional legal opinion for such a momentous decision. But the short summary of the attorney-general's new legal opinion was enough for many MPs and for the head of the armed forces.

For months senior legal officers were convinced the attorney-general shared their doubts, then came a series of meetings and some kind of legal revelation.

At a war cabinet meeting just after war started, Clare Short took Lord Goldsmith aside and asked why he had changed his mind.

The government is still refusing all requests to publish the attorney-general's full legal opinion. But we now know beyond doubt - the attorney-general never produced a full written legal opinion saying war without a second resolution was - definitively – legal. All the government has in the cupboard is an earlier one saying it is legally shaky.

Lord Goldsmith, what do you tell your four children when they ask about your role in the invasion of Iraq???

What sense of morality do you have to share with your children when you remain silent about a matter as grave as this, are you able to look them in the eyes and say, I did the right thing, pray tell, what do you say exactly?

The powers that be have allowed your name to be highlighted in this matter, your duty is to tell the truth since you are the only one who can. We urge you to do so, we live in a global village, the implications of this are very far reaching, history will not remember you kindly if you choose to remain silent.



In Germany they first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me — and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Pastor Martin Niemöller

BLAIR, GOLDSMITH AND STRAW MUST RESIGN

VOTE THESE WARMONGERS OUT OF PARLIAMENT

LIES, DECEIT, MISLEADING

400 YEARS OF COLONIAL RULE HAS TAUGHT THEM NOTHING

GOLDSMITH SHOULD BE DISBARRED

OUT OUT OUT