Make Blair Pay

Welcome campaign news:

In an about-face, Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday published the full text of the advice he received on the legitimacy of the Iraq war, as he tried to defuse a dispute that has derailed his re-election strategy just one week before British elections.

Parts of the 13-page document, written by Lord Goldsmith, Britain's attorney general, on March 7, 2003, were made public Wednesday by the BBC and Channel 4, prompting a new furor about whether Mr. Blair misled the nation by depicting the war as unequivocally lawful.

The full document showed that while Lord Goldsmith said in public on March 17, 2003, that the imminent invasion of Iraq was unambiguously legal, the private advice he gave to Mr. Blair 10 days earlier showed far greater concerns about the legal consequences of going to war.

..."But regime change cannot be the objective of military action," it concluded. "This should be borne in mind in considering the list of military targets and making public statements about any campaign."

Mr. Blair portrayed the war's objective as disarming Mr. Hussein of chemical and biological weapons, an argument that brought him severe criticism when no banned weapons were found in Iraq after the invasion.

...Michael Howard, the Conservative Party leader, said, "If you can't trust Mr. Blair on the decision to take the country to war - the most important decision a prime minister can take - how can you trust Mr. Blair on anything else ever again?"

And Charles Kennedy, the head of the Liberal Democrats - the only one of the three mainstream parties to oppose the invasion - declared, "This is not a damp squib for those who have lost loved ones in the service of the British armed forces or for the families of thousands of Iraqi innocents who have been killed."

...In the document, Lord Goldsmith wrote that since the cease-fire terms ending the first Iraqi war in 1991 had been set by the Security Council, Britain believed "it is for the Council to assess whether any such breach of those obligations has occurred."

Lord Goldsmith further wrote that the United States had "a rather different view: they maintain that the fact of whether Iraq is in breach is a matter of objective fact which may therefore by assessed by individual member states."

"I am not aware of any other state which supports this view," he added.