Official Dutch Inquiry Confirms: Iraq War Was Illegal
An official Dutch inquiry into the legality of the Iraq war has found that there was no legal basis for that conflict — the first indication that war crimes trials may yet follow against those western politicians who initiated it.
The Dutch Committee of Inquiry on Iraq said UN Security Council resolutions did not “constitute a mandate for… intervention in 2003.”
The report accused Dutch government ministers of a selective use of intelligence reports, and says Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende “gave little or no leadership to debates over the Iraq question.”
The Dutch parliament opposed the decision to back the invasion and Mr Balkenende was forced to give only political support to the attack on Iraq — a fact which might spare him any direct war crimes charges.
The committee chairman, Willibrord Davids, said the Netherlands’ loyalty to its alliance with the US and UK had taken precedence over the need to ensure the legality of the invasion.
“The wording of [UN Security Council] Resolution 1441 cannot reasonably be interpreted as authorising individual member states to use military force,” the report said. UN Resolution 1441 gave Iraq “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations” and was used by western politicians to justify the invasion.
The Dutch parliament is likely now to consider whether the prime minister misled parliament, and whether to launch a formal parliamentary inquiry.
The finding is bad news for Mr Gordon Brown. At the Chilcot Inquiry in London, Mr Brown was yesterday named as a “key member” of Tony Blair’s inner circle involved in decision-making on Iraq.
Giving evidence before the inquiry, Mr Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell said that Mr Brown would have been one of the “key ministers” to whom Mr Blair would have spoken prior to the invasion.
Other key advisers on Iraq included his foreign policy adviser Sir David Manning, his chief of staff Jonathan Powell, chief of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee Sir John Scarlett, foreign secretary Jack Straw and defence secretary Geoff Hoon.
Papers recently released under a Freedom of Information Act request showed that Mr Campbell, a former Daily Mirror journalist, demanded the inclusion of exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programmes.
The documents show the lying “Iraq Dossier”, which Mr Blair used to justify the war, was changed to make sure it echoed ridiculous claims by American ex-president George Bush.
The first draft of the British dossier was completed, using intelligence from MI6, on 10 September 2002. It concluded that it would take “at least two years” for Iraq to get a nuclear bomb.
Two days later President Bush used a keynote address to the United Nations to declare: “Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year.” The dossier was then simply changed to fit in with Mr Bush’s speech.
