[R-G] The Kings of England - George Monbiot

[Richard Menec]

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/01/01/the-kings-of-england/

The Kings of England

The unaccountable people who launched the Iraq war have learnt nothing from 
it.

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (January 01, 2008)

If you doubt that Britain needs a written constitution, listen to the 
strangely unbalanced discussion broadcast by the BBC on 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 this 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 might have killed a million people.

Lord Guthrie argued that parliamentary approval would mean that 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". Sir Kevin 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 Lord Guthrie said, for he appears to be 
advocating 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) {1}. If these fail, they should 
refer the matter to the Security Council (#37), which decides what measures 
should be taken (#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 Lord Guthrie does not understand the 
difference between a battle and a war - which is unlikely in view of his 44 
years of service {2} - 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" {3}. the 
tribunal's charter placed "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a 
war of aggression" {4} 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 House of Lords that "the time is approaching when we 
may have to join the United States in operations against Iraq ... Strike 
soon, and the threat will be less and easier to handle. If the United 
Nations route fails, I support the second option." {5} No one in the chamber 
warned him that he was proposing the supreme international crime. In another 
debate in the Lords, Guthrie argued that it was "unthinkable for British 
service men and women to be sent to the International Criminal Court", 
regardless of what they might have done {6}. He demanded a guarantee from 
the government that this would not be allowed to happen, and proposed that 
the British armed 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 
exceptionalism of the British establishment 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". {7} You cannot keep an operation secret from parliament unless you 
are also keeping it secret from the UN.

Sir Kevin appears to have a general aversion to disclosure. In 2003 the 
Guardian obtained letters showing that he had prevented the fraud squad at 
the ministry of defence from investigating allegations of corruption against 
the arms manufacturer BAE, that he tipped off the chairman of BAE about the 
contents of a confidential letter the Serious Fraud Office had sent him and 
that he failed to tell his minister about the fraud office's warnings {8}. 
In October 2003, under intense cross-examination during the Hutton inquiry 
into the death of the government scientist David Kelly, he revealed that the 
decision to name Dr Kelly was made in a "meeting chaired by the Prime 
Minister". {9} That could have been the end of Blair, but a week later Sir 
Kevin quietly sent Lord Hutton a written retraction of his evidence {10}. No 
one bothered to tell parliament or the press; the retraction was made public 
only when the Hutton report was published, three months later {11}. Blair 
knew all along, and the secret gave him a crushing advantage {12}.

The discussion also reveals that Guthrie and Tebbit appear to have learnt 
nothing from the disaster in Iraq. They are not alone. Soon before he 
stepped down last year, Tony Blair wrote an article for the Economist called 
What I've Learned {13}. 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 major 
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 really said, and what 
the attorney-general wrote about the legality of an invasion. Had the truth 
not been suppressed, our armed forces 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 new 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; it also means confronting the power of the 
cold, unaccountable people who act as if it is their birthright.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. http://www.un.org/aboutun/charter/

2. Lord Guthrie, 24th March 2004. House of Lords debates, Column 731. 
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200304/ldhansrd/vo040324/text/40324-05.htm

3. Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, 9th November 
2004. Aggressive War: Supreme International Crime. 
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/110904A.shtml

4. The Avalon Project at Yale Law School. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings. Vol 
1: Charter of the International Military Tribunal. 
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/imtconst.htm#art6

5. Lord Guthrie, 24th September 2002. House of Lords debate, Column 896. 
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200102/ldhansrd/vo020924/text/20924-03.htm#20924-03_spnew9

6. Lord Guthrie, 14th July 2005. House of Lords debate, Column 1234. 
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200506/ldhansrd/vo050714/text/50714-08.htm#50714-08_spnew0

7. Home Office, July 2007. The Governance of Britain. Green paper. Para
28, page 19. 
http://www.official-documents.gov.uk/document/cm71/7170/7170.pdf

8. David Leigh and Rob Evans, 13th October 2003. MoD chief in fraud cover-up 
row. The Guardian.

9. Sir Kevin Tebbit, 13th October 2003. Hearing Transcript, The Hutton 
Enquiry, para 57. 
http://www.the-hutton-inquiry.org.uk/content/transcripts/hearing-trans47.htm

10. Richard Norton-Taylor and Owen Bowcott, 2nd February 2004. Tebbit's late 
change put Blair in clear. The Guardian.

11. ibid.

12. John Kampfner, 2004. Blair's Wars. pages 350 and 364. Free Press, 
London.

13. Tony Blair, 31st May 2007. What I've learned. The Economist. 
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9257593

Copyright (c) 2006 Monbiot.com

==============
This email was sent to you as part of an alternative news service,
by Richard Ménec.  You can 'subscribe' or 'unsubscribe' by
replying to the sender with either term in the subject field.
Feel free to tell your friends.
Our website: http://booksinternationale.pbwiki.com/
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a
prior interest in receiving the included information for research
and educational purposes.
==============