This Guardian story is odd: War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal. “International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.” This was in a speech in London at the ICA.
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michael says
I think they’re going to try and finesse this fact in next year’s election campaign. They’re trying to innoculate themselves.
blork says
The telling sentence is this:
‘”international law … would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone”, and this would have been morally unacceptable.’
What’s really going on not an admission of guilt but an undermining of multilateralism.
Michael says
Bingo. Good eye.
There’s this thread in American politics at the moment in which owning up for something takes it off the list of acceptable things to discuss or to use as the basis for criticism. The person who criticizes someone who has already “openly” admitted something is themselves criticized for piling on or staying in the past or any number of things. I think they’re going for that here.