[Peace-discuss] Perle

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal 

Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday November 20, 2003
The Guardian 

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 at the Old Vic theatre 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 night'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 government 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 
accounting 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. 

A Pentagon spokesman pointed out yesterday that Mr Perle was not on the 
defence department staff, but was a member of an unpaid advisory board. 

Mr Perle refused to elaborate on his remarks.

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