Opinion Mark SteynA few months ago, you'll recall, the Pentagon declared the axis of weasels (France, Germany, Russia, Canada) ineligible for Iraqi reconstruction contracts. An affronted Gerhard Schröder replied that this act was illegal under international law.
President Bush took it in his stride. "International law?" he said. "I better call my lawyer. He didn't bring that up to me." Lovely line. I think of Bush's response a lot during this first anniversary of the Iraq war. In America, Britain and Australia, you don't hear much about Iraq now - the new constitution, the fading "insurgency". Instead, the Democrats in Washington and a strange British alliance of the freak-show left and the patrician right are still obsessed with why the war happened in the first place. In the increasingly surreal atmosphere of post-war Britain, it's Groundhog Day, with the clock frozen in March 2003.
For example, the other week, Clare Short, the disaffected ex-minister who revealed that MI6 was bugging Kofi Annan's office, said Blair had "leant on" the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, to provide an opinion that Britain going to war with Iraq would be "legal".
Lord Goldsmith apparently had "profound doubts" about the legality of the action. All over the news bulletins and op-ed pages, the controversy raged. Big deal.
Last year, I had a conversation with the late Gareth Williams, then leader of the House of Lords and one of the most affable of Blairite cabinet ministers. I was moaning about the way the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a far more forceful proponent of the case against Saddam than Colin Powell, nevertheless felt obliged to keep emphasising that Britain was not committed to regime change in Iraq. "What's the deal with all this no-regime-change stuff?" I asked. "Well," said Lord Williams, a former attorney-general himself, "if we were to say we were going to war to change the regime it would be illegal." I rolled my eyes, and he chuckled. "Don't laugh," he said. "Tony takes that sort of thing very seriously." That's the difference. Unlike Bush, when Blair says "International law? I better call my lawyer", he's not joking.
But nor, on occasion, is Washington. That's one reason I can't take seriously the allegations of Richard Clarke, Clinton's terrorism guy, who's now touting a book arguing that the Bush administration turned its back on the brilliant Clintonian approach to fighting terrorism. Perhaps because for various, ah, other reasons he was spending so much time with lawyers himself, Clinton's approach to terrorism was mired in legalism, and the only problem is not that Bush rejected it but that so much of it lingered on into the opening weeks of the war on terror.
For example, on the first night of the Afghan campaign, an unmanned CIA drone identified Mullah Omar's jeep fleeing Kabul, and, lacking the authority to push the button, relayed the news back to Florida. Tommy Franks is said to have replied: "My JAG doesn't like this, so we're not going to fire." A JAG is a Judge Advocate-General, as I happen to know only because of a CBS TV series of the same name. It speaks volumes for our times that the only military adventure series on network TV is about a navy lawyer. So, instead of being killed on the first night as a cautionary tale in the perils of playing host to those who slaughter US civilians, the one-eyed mullah is still out there somewhere, in some cave.
Chewing things over with Lord Williams, I thought of the National Rifle Association bumper sticker: "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns." If you outlaw imperialist aggression, only outlaws will imperialistically aggress. When Saddam wants to gas Kurds, he doesn't need to seek an opinion from his attorney-general on the legality thereof. Article one of the Iraq constitution pretty much covered every eventuality: "The President-For-Life shall have the right to do whatever the hell he wants."
For 80 years the more or less sane powers have looked to international legalism to contain outlaws. In the League of Nations era, the fellows who didn't bother consulting their JAGs were themselves great powers - Germany, Japan and so forth. During the Cold War, the outlaws were at least great-power proxies - the various Soviet clients destabilising Africa and Asia.
But these days the outlaws represent nobody but themselves, and the result of the "legalistic" regime of global relations is that it confers a technically inviolable sovereignty on every tinpot thug on the planet. You see it at UN HQ any day of the week. Last August, after the terrorist attack on the UN in Iraq, the Security Council president expressed his condemnation of the incident.
The president was at that time the representative of Syria. Syria is a terrorist state. So a fellow who's usually the apologist for terrorists gets to go on TV to represent the international community's determination to stand up to terrorism. International legalism, by obliging us to make no distinction in legitimacy between a Syrian ambassador and a New Zealand one, vastly inflates the status of the former - and diminishes that of the latter.
International law? "I better call my lawyer." Better not to. The civilised world cannot depend on legal niceties to protect it from the horrors of the new century. If the Iraq war turns out to have been "illegal", that's just another bonus.