The Cherie Blair interview in The Guardian is well worth reading and I’m sure it will be all over the news that the Blairs have not been invited to Downing Street by the Browns. But to my mind the most interesting part was when Martin Kettle pressed Cherie on the legality of the Iraq war:
“Of course, as a lawyer, I thought about it … And like everything else, as we know from the attorney general down, there are different views about this matter. The one thing I would say, as a lawyer, is that we all know that if there had been a right answer to it in international law terms, don’t you think that would have been clear? It wasn’t clear. It still isn’t clear.
I was not advising the army and nor was I advising my husband on the law. I really am not going to get involved in a discussion about the legal position of the Iraq war. I am not the person to do that because I am not sufficiently impartial as a lawyer about this, because it’s a matter that is of interest to the person that I am closest to in the world.”
Cherie might not be impartial but her fundamental point is right: in contentious cases, international law is not that much use as the interpretation of it varies so greatly. Indeed, most people use international law as a proxy for morality—which it isn’t.
Revealingly, the emphasis on legality is selective. Few talk about the legality of the intervention in Kosovo, which in strict international law terms had less justification than the war in Iraq, because most people still think that Kosovo was ‘the right thing’ to do. Personally, I still think that the Iraq war was justified but one has to concede that there are many strong arguments against it. The argument about its supposed illegality, though, is one of the weakest.
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