How
Britain Became Party To A Crime That May Have Killed A Million People
By
George Monbiot
03 January,
2008
Monbiot.com
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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