Ex-British diplomat: Iraq invasion was of ‘questionable legitimacy'

The March 2003 military invasion of Iraq was "legal but of questionable legitimacy" because the U.N. Security Council had not voted to support it, a former top British diplomat said last week at a parliamentary inquiry examining Britain's role in the war.

Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, told the inquiry that he had favored waiting until October 2003 before resorting to force. He said the French in March were proposing a three- to four-month ultimatum to Baghdad, and the Saudis and other Arab governments were interested in working to get Saddam Hussein to go into exile.

But, he said, "the soldiers probably wanted to get on with it," and the United States "did not want to start a military operation in the summer months."

Asked whether he thought "the military tail was wagging the diplomatic dog," Greenstock answered, "Yes, of course."

The parliamentary inquiry is being conducted by a committee of privy counselors, appointed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and chaired by John Chilcot, a career civil servant. The panel is to look at the run-up to the Iraq war, from summer 2001 to the fighting, and then to the aftermath, through July 31, 2009.

The purpose, Chilcot said in July, is to study "the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned."

Greenstock told the panel on Friday that the U.S. and British attack in March 2003 was "legal but of questionable legitimacy in that it didn't have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of [United Nations] member states or even perhaps a majority of people inside the United Kingdom."

He said any attempt to take more time to resolve the standoff over Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction was overcome by the United States, which was "much too strong for us to counter." Greenstock pointed out that some in the U.S. government viewed Iraq's statement to the United Nations on Dec. 7, 2001, that it had no weapons of mass destruction as adequate cause to go to war.

He said that although the British thought the use of force "could not be justified unless every other avenue had been tried to bring Iraq into compliance" with U.N. resolutions barring Iraq from maintaining such weapons, "there were those in the [Bush] administration who thought that was a waste of time."

In the fall of 2002, when it was still not clear the proponents of the invasion would wait for the United Nations to act, Greenstock said he considered stepping aside. "I myself warned the Foreign Office in October that I might have to consider my own position if that was the way things went."

In November 2002, however, when agreement was reached on a resolution sending inspectors back into Iraq, "I did not feel that by March I could represent in my argument in the Security Council that the inspectors had had enough time," he said.

Despite the efforts of Greenstock and John D. Negroponte, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, they could not get a majority vote in March from Security Council members to support the use of force against Hussein.

In unsuccessfully pushing for a delay until October, Greenstock argued that there was a chance of finding a smoking gun, because he thought Iraq was hiding its chemical and biological weapons, much as it tried to hide fighter planes by burying them in the desert.

He also said he hoped that through the delay he could "establish an unambiguous, an undisputed legal basis for the use of force if everybody agreed that Saddam was not cooperating satisfactorily."

After the invasion, extensive searches did not turn up any weapons of mass destruction.

The inquiry was adjourned until Monday.

During his testimony, Greenstock pointed out one problem with trying to enforce economic sanctions, using as an example Iraq's smuggling out of oil to nearby countries. Asked why Syria was not questioned about Iraqi oil going through its borders, Greenstock said, "The point about smuggling was that it was proceeding, not just through Syria but through Turkey and Jordan as well."

He added that a crackdown on Syria would require going after the other two countries, and both talked "mostly in private, but sometimes in public, about the economic cost of stopping the smuggling channels and wanted compensation for that."