So we are reduced to a United States led war against Iraq. It is a great failure of politics and diplomacy. It flies in the face of the majority on the United Nations Security Council.
That majority does not accept a war is the only means available to ensure Iraq complies with UN demands that it disarm its weapons of mass destruction. This is, therefore, an unacceptable war of highly doubtful legality and legitimacy. It will endanger the international order which the United Nations was created to protect .
It is a measure of the political and diplomatic failure of the US and Britain to make a convincing case for war that they yesterday withdrew their Security Council resolution. They feared having it voted down would undermine their need to rely on previous resolutions. It is quite clear politically and legally that Resolution 1441 passed last November required the Security Council explicitly to authorise the use of force in another resolution.
Without it, Britain and the US can rely only on their own tenuous interpretation now of what is necessary to deal with Saddam Hussein. The very essence of the legitimacy and legality established by the United Nations Charter is that the clear procedures it lays down be followed in such crises. That is why the decision to go to war following such strenuous but unsuccessful efforts to obtain a Security Council resolution authorising war cannot be accepted.
France is being blamed for this decision. It is true that the decision to use their veto introduced an inflexible element into the intense negotiations of recent days. This prevented other states from gravitating towards a possible consensus. But the only basis for that was to give the Iraqis some more time to comply, possibly one month as a potential hard-fought compromise. Such a timetable, as put forward by the six or so swing states on the Security Council, was flatly rejected by the US. In the face of this prior inflexibility it is not surprising that France upheld its position. The refusal of the swing states to bow to the extraordinary pressure brought to bear on them should be recognised by those who dismiss the UN as a vehicle for cynical power politics.
Mr Tony Blair made genuine attempts to keep the US within the UN framework in recent weeks. He failed and has now jettisoned that worthwhile objective. By sticking with President Bush, he has become a passenger with limited influence on US plans to rule Iraq directly.
The aims of this war are changed by the circumstances of its pronouncement. Disarming Iraq is secondary now to overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime and reordering Middle East politics. Such objectives are emphatically not covered by existing UN resolutions, however abstractly desirable.
The price paid in terms of legality and legitimacy is too high. We must hope for a short war. But the subsequent peace remains deeply problematic and contested because of these unacceptable decisions by the United States, Britain and their allies.