ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 looks at the debate over the legality of war with Iraq in the absence of explicit UN Security Council approval. It does three things. To begin with, it highlights the range of different views within British public debate of what the UN was properly supposed to do. Some saw it as a legal arbiter, some as a moral authority and some as a forum for political deal-making. Unambiguous Council approval might have satisfied everyone. But after the high-point marked by the passage of Security Council Resolution (SCR) 1441 in November 2002, the shaky consensus among the great powers soon fell apart. Second, Chapter 6 talks about the procedural ambiguities that surrounded Britain’s engagement with the UN over Iraq. SCR 1441 deliberately left unclear the question of whether the Council itself or its individual member states possessed the authority to resort to force in the event of apparent Iraqi non-compliance. Ministers failed to frame UNMOVIC, the UN weapons inspection body, as an auditor rather than a detective agency. That led to questions about the need for ‘smoking guns’. Finally, there was a fundamental clash between the US military timetable and the UN inspection programme. It might have been possible to exhaust inspections in time for the preferred US start date for war, but only in the event of clear Iraqi obstructionism. Equally, unambiguous Iraqi co-operation might have made war politically impossible. Iraq, however, co-operated moderately but not as well as UNMOVIC wanted. This created still more ambiguity, and left the Blair government struggling to find arguments to allow it to bridge the gap between the US drive to war and its own stated commitment to upholding international law.
