Blair knew Iraq bombing was illegal but ordered it anyway – media
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 13, 2010 © AP / Matt Rourke
RT | April 17, 2023
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered the 1998 bombing of Iraq despite repeated warnings that such a move was unlawful, according to documents published by Declassified UK on Monday. Blair would follow the same template – insisting that illegal military action was legal – when the UK invaded Iraq in 2003.
The US and UK launched a four-day bombing campaign against Iraq in December 1998, after then-US President Bill Clinton accused Saddam Hussein of breaching commitments to the UN and developing weapons of mass destruction. As many as 1,400 Iraqi soldiers were killed in strikes on around 100 military facilities.
In the runup to the bombings, Blair was repeatedly told by his advisers that using force against Iraq would be illegal without a resolution from the UN Security Council, according to documents from the National Archives cited by Declassified UK, an investigative outlet that focuses on Britain’s military and intelligence agencies.
Attorney General John Morris reportedly told Blair in November 1997 that obtaining a statement from the Security Council would be “an essential precondition” to military action, while Blair’s private secretary, John Holmes, told the prime minister that British law officers and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook had a “serious problem about using force unless the Security Council declares that Iraq is in ‘material breach’ of previous resolutions.”
When the law officers refused to authorize the military to draw up targeting plans, Blair reportedly wrote to Holmes, stating that he found their argument “unconvincing.”
Blair continuously received warnings throughout 1998, the report alleged, with Cook’s private secretary writing to Holmes that February to warn that “the negative implications for international support if we resort to military action without a new resolution would be serious.”
When Blair announced military action to Parliament in November, he declared: “I have no doubt that we have the proper legal authority, as it is contained in successive Security Council resolution documents.” British officials claimed that a 1990 resolution authorizing UN members to force Hussein’s army out of Kuwait gave them permission to intervene again in Iraq, an argument that only the US, Japan, and Portugal supported.
According to the documents, Blair saw bombing Iraq as essential to maintaining his close relationship with Clinton. In a meeting with advisers in November, he supposedly said that failing to intervene would cause “extreme damage” to US-UK relations. That same day, even as his own aides maintained that intervention was illegal, Blair told Clinton that the US “could count on our support.”
Five years later, Blair would find himself in the same situation, when he falsely claimed that Hussein was harboring weapons of mass destruction and invoked earlier Security Council resolutions to justify invading Iraq. Again, Blair was warned by his attorney general that military action would defy international law, and again he pressed ahead regardless.
More than a decade later, a public inquiry found that the legal case for the invasion was “far from satisfactory,” while then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan maintained from the outset that the war was “illegal.”
1 Comment »
Leave a comment
Featured Video
No More Ukraine Proxy War? You’re a Traitor!
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
The lies about the 1967 war are still more powerful than the truth
By Alan Hart | June 4, 2012
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
Blog Roll
Recent Comments
Bill Francis on Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate… Sheree Sheree on I was canceled by three newspa… Richard Ong on Czech–Slovak alignment signals… John Edward Kendrick on Colonel Jacques Baud & Nat… eddieb on Villains of Judea: Ronald Laud… rezjiekc on Substack Imposes Digital ID Ch… loongtip on US strikes three vessels in Ea… eddieb on An Avoidable Disaster Steve Jones on For Israel, The Terrorist Atta… cleversensationally3… on Over Half of Germans Feel Unab… loongtip on Investigation Into U.S. Milita… loongtip on Zelensky’s Impossible De…
Aletho News- How Policies From The Bi-Parisian Foreign Policy Establishment Led To Trump’s Venezuela War
- No More Ukraine Proxy War? You’re a Traitor!
- Sexual Blackmail Makes the World Go ‘Round
- Powerful Israeli Strikes on South Lebanon and Bekaa
- UAE-backed militia in Yemen reaches out to Israel for alliance against ‘common foes’: Report
- The UAE’s reverse trajectory: From riches to rags
- Chris Minns Defends NSW “Hate Speech” Laws Linking Censorship to Terror Prevention
- Majority of Belgians oppose theft of Russian assets – poll
- Czech–Slovak alignment signals growing dissatisfaction with Brussels’ authoritarianism
- Colonel Jacques Baud & Nathalie Yamb Sanctioned: EU Goes Soviet
- If Americans Knew
- Amnesty: ‘Utterly preventable’ Gaza flood tragedy must mobilize global action to end Israel’s genocide
- Israel Propagandists Are Uniformly Spouting The Exact Same Line About The Bondi Beach Shooting
- Ha’aretz: Free the Palestinian Activist Who Dared to Document Israel’s Crimes in the West Bank
- Garbage Is Poisoning Gaza
- Palestinian journalist recounts rape and torture in Israeli prison
- Gaza is crumbling, but its people persevere – Not a Ceasefire Day 69
- Pro-Israel billionaire Miriam Adelson green-lights a Trump 3rd term
- Australians Being Massacred Shouldn’t Bother Us More Than Palestinians Being Massacred
- Garbage, stench, sewage, and rats plague Gaza – Not a Ceasefire Day 68
- The Zionist Billionaire Circle Hiding in Plain Sight
- No Tricks Zone
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
- Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon Challenges The Climate Consensus … It’s The Sun, Not CO2
- Regional Cooling Since The 1980s Has Driven Glacier Advance In The Karakoram Mountains
- Greenland Petermann Glacier Has Grown 30 Kilometers Since 2012!
- New Study: Temperature-Driven CO2 Outgassing Explains 83 Percent Of CO2 Rise Since 1959
- Climate Extremists Ordered By Hamburg Court To Pay €400,000 In Damages
- More Evidence NE China Is Not Cooperating With The Alarmist Global Warming Narrative
Aletho News 
Kofi Anon knew the Iraqi invasion was illegal but said or did little to stop it. Bush and Cheney knew WMD did not exist in Iraq. Bush and Cheney also knew Iraq had nothing to do with ISIS and the Jihad movement to create a Caliphate. Which by the way was sponsored by British and US intelligence agencies. Who can forget the photo of Zbigniew Brzenski standing on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan holding a rifle, showing off his support of his Arc of Crisis agenda? The Mujahadeen that drove Russia out of Afghanistan became the Frankenstein monster al Qaeda that morphed into ISIS, whose fighters were recruited in London Mosque, and armed with weapons furnished by British BAE and CIA.
We’ve watched over the past three decades or more as one perpetual war after another was started by the US/UK axis of war. What good has come from those wars? Libya is a broken state of tribal warfare. Syria is still occupied by US forces after more than 10 years of fighting ISIS and CIA-sponsored Jihadis. It is reported that 90% of Syrians are living below the poverty line while the country is being choked to death by sanctions and US occupation of Syria’s oil and food-producing regions. Afghanistan was invaded three times since 1920. First by the British, then the Russians, and then NATO. Iraq is still occupied in some areas by ISIS and PKK fighters.
The people of Iraq are still without the level of infrastructure necessary to recover, which was destroyed during the US “shock and awe” invasion.
As for the UN, it operates today as a rubber stamp of the US. British mouthpiece Tony Blair deserves to be imprisoned in an adjoining cell next to the Clintons. Geopolitical operatives Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Susan Rice, Richard Perle, and John Brennen all belong behind bars for the murderous campaigns they sponsored. And what about the current crop of hegemon seekers in the Biden administration? All of them should be locked up in a padded room before they get us all killed in thermonuclear WW3!
LikeLiked by 1 person