IRAQ: Mr Kenneth Roth, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said that the war could not be justified as a humanitarian intervention because, despite Saddam's past brutality, he was not endangering the lives of large numbers of people when the war began last March.
Had military action taken place during Saddam's ethnicidal attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, in order to save the lives of innocent civilians it could have been justified, Mr Roth told reporters at the launch of HRW's 2004 World Report on Human Rights and Armed Conflict.
"Saddam has killed at least a quarter of a million Iraqis, but there was nothing like that level of killing in 2003. Fear of a resumption of mass killings is not a justification as there has to be some reason to believe this killing is about to happen, and no one alleged that in 2003, Saddam Hussein was about to embark on the mass slaughter of earlier years," Mr Roth said.
"The lack of large-scale killing is a decisive factor in rejecting the use of military intervention in Iraq. Such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter. They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past," he said.
"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair."
Mr Blair and Mr Bush used the premise that Saddam Hussein had amassed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that presented an immediate threat to world peace as justification for bypassing multilateral methods of international problem solving and attacking Iraq last March.
The failure to find weapons of mass destruction since the war ended a month later has seen both leaders fall back on Saddam's brutal track record to justify the war.
In contrast, in the decade running up to the war, Human Rights Watch had repeatedly tried to gain US, British and wider international backing for an indictment of Saddam in an international court for crimes against humanity, but failed because governments were not willing to back such a move.
Mr Roth said he believed that the enormous moral suasion of such an indictment, as in the case of former Serbian president Slobodan Milsovic and the former Liberian leader, Charles Taylor, would have resulted in Saddam Hussein's ejection before the war against him began.
He said HRW had found it impossible to estimate the number of civilian casualties in last year's war, which has been put at 15,000 by other monitoring groups.