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How
Britain became party to a crime that may have killed a million
people
Not having a written constitution allowed Blair and his advisers
to go to war without reference to parliament or the public
By George Monbiot
01/02/08 "The
Guardian" -- -- If you doubt Britain needs a
written constitution, listen to the strangely unbalanced
discussion broadcast by the BBC last Friday. The Today programme
asked Lord Guthrie, formerly chief of the defence staff, and Sir
Kevin Tebbit, until recently the senior civil servant at the
Ministry of Defence, if parliament should decide whether or not
the country goes to war. The discussion was a terrifying
exposure of the privileges of unaccountable power. It explained
as well as anything I have heard how Britain became party to a
crime that may have killed a million people.
Guthrie argued that parliamentary approval would mean
intelligence had to be shared with MPs; that the other side
could not be taken by surprise ("do you want to warn the enemy
you are going to do it?"), and that commanders should have "a
choice about when to attack and when not to attack". Tebbit
maintained that "no prime minister would be able to deploy
forces without being able to command a parliamentary majority.
In that sense, the executive is already accountable to
parliament". Once the prime minister has his majority, in other
words, MPs become redundant.
Let me dwell for a moment on what Guthrie said, for he appears
to advocate that we retain the right to commit war crimes.
States in dispute with each other, the UN charter says, must
first seek to solve their differences by "peaceful means"
(article 33). If these fail, they should refer the matter to the
security council (article 37), which decides what measures
should be taken (article 39). Taking the enemy by surprise is a
useful tactic in battle, and encounters can be won only if
commanders are able to make decisions quickly. But either
Guthrie does not understand the difference between a battle and
a war - which is unlikely in view of his 44 years of service -
or he does not understand the most basic point in international
law. Launching a surprise war is forbidden by the charter.
It has become fashionable to scoff at these rules and to dismiss
those who support them as pedants and prigs, but they are all
that stand between us and the greatest crimes in history. The
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ruled that "to
initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international
crime; it is the supreme international crime". The tribunal's
charter placed "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a
war of aggression" at the top of the list of war crimes.
If Britain's most prominent retired general does not understand
this, it can only be because he has never been forced to
understand it. In September 2002, he argued in the Lords that
"the time is approaching when we may have to join the US in
operations against Iraq ... Strike soon, and the threat will be
less and easier to handle. If the UN route fails, I support the
second option." No one in the chamber warned him that he was
proposing the supreme international crime. In another Lords
debate, Guthrie argued that it was "unthinkable for British
servicemen and women to be sent to the International Criminal
Court", regardless of what they might have done. He demanded a
guarantee from the government that this would not be allowed to
happen, and proposed that the British forces should be allowed
to opt out of the European convention on human rights. The grey
heads murmured their agreement.
Perhaps it is unfair to single out the noble and gallant lord.
The British establishment's exceptionalism is almost universal.
According to the government, both the Commons public
administration committee and the Lords constitution committee
recognise that decision-making should "provide sufficient
flexibility for deployments which need to be made without prior
parliamentary approval for reasons of urgency or necessary
operational secrecy". You cannot keep an operation secret from
parliament unless you are also keeping it secret from the UN.
Tebbit appears to have a general aversion to disclosure. In
2003, the Guardian obtained letters showing he had prevented the
fraud squad at the MoD from investigating allegations of
corruption against the arms manufacturer BAE, that he tipped off
the BAE chairman about the contents of a confidential letter the
Serious Fraud Office had sent him, and that he failed to tell
his minister about the SFO's warnings. In October 2003, under
cross-examination during the Hutton inquiry into the death of
the government scientist David Kelly, he revealed the decision
to name Kelly was made in a "meeting chaired by the prime
minister". That could have been the end of Tony Blair, but a
week later Tebbit sent Lord Hutton a written retraction of his
evidence. No one bothered to tell parliament or the press; the
retraction was made public only when the Hutton report was
published, three months later. Blair knew all along, and the
secret gave him a crushing advantage.
The discussion also reveals that Guthrie and Tebbit appear to
have learned nothing from the disaster in Iraq. They are not
alone. Just before he stepped down last year, Blair wrote an
article for the Economist headlined "What I've Learned". He had
discovered, he claimed, that his critics were both wrong and
dangerous and that his decisions, based on "freedom, democracy,
responsibility to others, but also justice and fairness", were
difficult but invariably right. He called his article "a very
short synopsis of what I have learned". I could think of an even
shorter one.
We have yet to hear one word of regret or remorse from any of
the main architects - Blair, Brown, Straw, Hoon, Campbell and
their principal advisers - of Britain's participation in the
supreme international crime. The press and parliament appear to
have heeded Blair's plea that we all "move on" from Iraq. The
British establishment has a unique capacity to move on, and then
to repeat its mistakes. What other former empire knows so little
of its own atrocities?
When people call our unwritten constitution a "gentleman's
agreement", they reveal more than they intend. It allows the
unelected gentlemen who advise the prime minister to act without
reference to the proles. Britain went to war in Iraq because the
public and parliament were not allowed to know when the decision
was made, what the intelligence reports said, and what the
attorney general wrote about the its legality. Had the truth not
been suppressed, Britain could never have attacked Iraq.
Real constitutional reform requires much more than the timid
proposals in the green paper on the governance of Britain, which
are likely to appear in a bill in a few weeks' time. Yes,
parliament should be allowed to vote on whether to go to war,
yes the royal prerogative should be rolled back. But the prime
minister, his diplomats, civil servants and generals would still
decide which wars parliament needs to know about, which crimes
could be secretly committed in our name. Real constitutional
reform means not only handing power to parliament but also
confronting the power of the hard, unaccountable people who act
as if it is their birthright.
monbiot.com
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