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74 July-August 2023 July-August 2023 75
The same criminality of aggression applies to
the US and UK governments, which invaded
Iraq 20 years ago today. Among the most
senior perpetrators were Rice and Brown
I
t goes beyond hypocrisy. It’s an assault
on memory. Gordon Brown, calling for a
special tribunal to punish the Russian
government, correctly states that an act
of aggression – invading another nation
– was identified by the Nuremberg tribunal as
“the supreme international crime”. It is, he
wrote in the Guardian, not just Vladimir Putin
who should be prosecuted, but also his
“henchmen”. These include members of the
Russian and perhaps Belarusian national
security councils, and a range of political and
military leaders. All should be held to account
for this “manifestly illegal war”, he wrote on his
website.
which, as Brown points out, its senior ocials
are complicit. The same applies to the US and
UK governments, which invaded Iraq 20 years
ago today. Among the most senior perpetrators
were Rice and Brown.
The seventh of the Nuremberg Principles,
which Brown cites in calling for Russian
prosecutions, points out that “complicity” in a
war of aggression “is a crime under international
law”. Both ocials would clearly qualify as
complicit. Rice was one of the architects of the
war. Brown, as a cabinet member, was party to
the decision. As Chancellor of the Exchequer,
he financed the war.
No one can credibly deny that the invasion of
Iraq met the Nuremberg definition. The Chilcot
inquiry, whose terms were set by Brown when
he was Prime Minister, was forbidden to
The hypocrisy of US
and UK war criminality
Yes, Putin and his henchmen should be
prosecuted for war crimes. So should those
who led the invasion of Iraq
By George Monbiot
Condoleezza Rice, who was George W Bush’s
national security adviser, was asked of Russia’s
aggression on Fox News, “when you invade a
sovereign nation, that is a war crime?” She
replied: “It is certainly against every principle
of international law and international order.”
Brown and Rice are right about Russia. Its
government, in invading Ukraine, has clearly
committed the crime of aggression, a crime in
INTERNATIONAL
74 July-August 2023 July-August 2023 75
pronounce on the legality of the war. But it
concluded that “the UK chose to join the
invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options for
disarmament had been exhausted. Military
action at that time was not a last resort.” In
other words, it failed to meet the UN charter’s
criteria for legal warfare. The former law lord,
Lord Steyn, came to the same conclusion: “In
the absence of a second UN resolution
authorising invasion, it was illegal”. The former
lord chief justice, Lord Bingham, called the Iraq
war “a serious violation of international law”. A
Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court
judge, found that the invasion had “no sound
mandate in international law”.
The attackers went out of their way to
eliminate peaceful alternatives. Saddam
Hussein desperately sought to negotiate,
eventually oering everything the US and UK
governments said they wanted, but they
slapped his hand away, then lied to us about it.
When the UN sought diplomatic solutions, US
ocials went into what they called “thwart
mode”, sabotaging negotiations.
When the head of the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, José Bustani,
oered to resolve the impasse over weapons
inspections in Iraq, the US government illegally
ousted him. The first government to support his
sacking was the United Kingdom’s.
The government in which Brown was
chancellor was repeatedly warned that its
planned invasion would be illegal. A year before
the war, the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw,
explained that for a war to be legal, “i) There
must be an armed attack upon a State or such
an attack must be imminent; ii) The use of force
must be necessary and other means to reverse/
avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) The
acts in self-defence must be proportionate and
strictly confined to the object of stopping the
attack”. None of these conditions applied. The
Foreign Oce, according to its deputy legal
adviser, Elizabeth Wilmshurst, consistently
counselled that an invasion would be unlawful
without a new UN resolution. She explained that
“an unlawful use of force on such a scale
amounts to the crime of aggression”. A Cabinet
Oce memo warned: “A legal justification for
invasion would be needed. Subject to Law
Ocers’ advice, none currently exists.”
As for “law ocers’ advice”, the then attorney
general, Lord Goldsmith, warned that there were
only three ways in which an invasion could be
legally justified. They were “self-defence,
humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [UN security
council] authorisation. The first and second could
not be the base in this case.” The government
failed to obtain UN security council authorisation.
At the Chilcot inquiry, Lord Goldsmith testified
that, after he gave advice Tony Blair didn’t want
to hear, the prime minister stopped asking. Just
before the war, though the facts had not changed,
Goldsmith changed his mind.
There is another way of saying “crime of
aggression”: an act of mass murder. The
invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands
of people. We cannot be more precise than that,
as the invading forces refused to measure the
carnage. But it is almost certainly the greatest
crime against humanity so far this century.
Blair, Brown, Bush and Rice are as guilty of a
“manifestly illegal war” as Putin and his close
advisers.
But who gets prosecuted is a matter of
victors’ justice. For example, until it issued a
warrant last week on another charge for the
arrest of Putin and one of his ocials, there had
been 31 cases brought before the international
criminal court. Every one of the defendants in
these cases is African. Is this because Africa is
the only continent where crimes against
humanity had occurred? No. It’s because
Africans accused of such crimes do not enjoy
the political protections aorded to the western
leaders who perpetrate even greater atrocities.
Instead of facing justice, the killers walk
among us, respected, revered, treated as the
elder statesmen to whom media and
There is another way
of saying “crime of
aggression”: an act of
mass murder. The invasion
of Iraq killed hundreds
of thousands of people,
almost certainly the
greatest crime against
humanity so far this century
Putin nd ferful courtiers
US militry video, leked to Wikileks,
showing 2007 ttck by Apche
helicopters tht killed dozen people in
Bghdd, including two Reuters news stff
– to lughter
governments turn for counsel. Brown can pose
as an august humanitarian. Alastair Campbell,
who oversaw the compilation of the “dodgy
dossier”, which provided a false case for war,
and is therefore as complicit as any of Putin’s
“henchmen”, has been thoroughly
screenwashed: in other words, rehabilitated,
like other grim political figures, by television.
He is now treated as a kind of national agony
uncle.
There has been no reckoning and nor will
there be. This greatest of crimes has been so
thoroughly airbrushed that its perpetrators can
anoint themselves the avenging angels of other
people’s atrocities. “Plate sin with gold, and the
strong lance of justice hurtless breaks: arm it in
rags, a pigmy’s straw does pierce it.”
www.monbiot.com. This article first appeared
in THE GUARDIAN
