Blair wants overhaul of UN to meet 21st-century challenges

Many people's first reaction to being told that they have broken a law is to argue that it is the law which is wrong rather than their actions. It's a common enough reaction.

Blair yesterday took that philosophy to the limit.

He now contends that the UN should drastically rewrite the rule book, arguing that the rules were written for a post WWII world and that, in today's modern world, action had to be pre-emptive and not reactive.

"The war split the world, now the struggle of Iraq for democracy should unite it," he told an audience of students and faculty members at Georgetown University, urging "a new concord to replace the old contention".

It's a fascinating argument, but it's an argument that one would only expect to hear had the opponents of the Iraq war been proven to be wrong.

Perhaps in Blair's deluded mind that is the case, however, with Iraq descending into chaos there can be very few who agree with him.

The rules regarding pre-emptive war have been clearly established since the Caroline incident of 1837, which holds that "anticipatory self-defense" may be justified only in cases in which the "necessity of that self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation".

The simple fact that Blair is attempting to side step here is that his invasion of Iraq did not comply with Caroline, far less with article 51 of the UN Charter.

UN inspectors were on the ground and should have been allowed to finish their work. Had they been allowed to do so thousands of people who are now dead would still be alive.

Inconvenient facts like this are studiously avoided in Blair's rewriting of the conflict.

There is, as always with Blair, strands of good sense thrown into the mix. For example, it's hard to argue with his contention that:

A council "which has France as a permanent member but not Germany; Britain but not Japan; China but not India, to say nothing of the absence of proper representation from Latin America or Africa, cannot be legitimate," he said.

In this, he is correct.

However, the rules regarding pre-emptive action are already established. Both Kosovo and Sierra Leone are examples that Blair has recently quoted, in an attempt to claim that the Iraq war is of a similar mould.

However, he undermines his own argument by claiming that international law should be changed to legitimise the Iraq conflict.

There was no need to change international law after Kosovo or Sierra Leone because both those interventions were clearly within those laws.

The fact that Blair is even making these arguments is a tacit admission that Iraq was not.

It's not dissimilar to Richard Perle's statement in November 2003, when he told an astonished audience in London:

"I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

Often, it is in making their defence that these guys inadvertently admit their guilt. So it was with Perle, and so it is with Blair.

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Tags: Blair, Iraq, UN, Georgetown, university, pre-emptive, action,