Annan: Invasion of Iraq 'illegal'

Also, US intel report shows 'dark prospects' for Iraq, as Bush's postwar policy takes other hits.

by Tom Regan
Jim Bencivenga csmonitor.com

In an interview with the BBC Wednesday, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said the decision to launch an invasion of Iraq should have been taken by the entire United Nations, and not taken unilaterially. When pressed for a third time by a BBC interviewer if that meant that the invasion was illegal, Mr. Annan said that "if you like" it was "not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, and from the charter point of view it was illegal."

"I think in the end everybody's concluded it's best to work together with our allies and through the UN," he said. "I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time - without UN approval and much broader support from the international community," he added.Annan also said that, given the current levels of unrest in Iraq, it was unlikely that it would be possible for "credible" elections to be held by the current scheduled date in January.

The US and its allies in Iraq almost immediately denounced Annan's statements. Randy Scheunemann, a former adviser to US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said the statement, 51 days before a US election, "reeks of political interference."

The Age reports Thursday that Australian Prime Minister John Howard, himself in the middle of an election campaign where his decision to send Australian troops to Iraq is a key issue, said the invasion was "warranted." He said the UN was a fine body, but it was often "paralyzed" because "its members struggled to reach consensus." Britain and Japan also defended their decisions to send troops to Iraq.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that a National Intelligence Estimate prepared for President Bush contains a "dark assessment of prospects for Iraq." The Associated Press reports that the report, prepared over the summer by senior analysts (and before the current wave of new violence in Iraq) offers a bleak picture of Iraq's future security and stability.
The National Intelligence Council looked at the political, economic and security situation in the war-torn country and determined at best the situation would be tenuous in terms of stability, a US official said late Wednesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. At worst, the official said, were "trend lines that would point to a civil war."A recent report by a prestigious British foreign affairs think tank, known as Chatham House, also said that civil wa was the "default scenario" for Iraq.

USA Today reports that the bleak prospects contained in the estimates were apparently just one of the reasons that Wednesday a group of leading senators who accused the White House of "incompetence" in its reconstruction efforts in Iraq and said the United States "could lose the war unless it improves security and gets more money into the Iraqi economy."

Among those making critical remarks were the two senior Republican members of the Foreign Relations Committee: Chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. Sen. Hagel said the situation had gone beyond "embarrassing" and had entered the "zone of dangerous," and that the entire effort in Iraq was "in deep trouble." Sen. Lugar was also blunt in his assessment of the sitaution.

'Our committee heard blindly optimistic people from the administration prior to the war and people outside the administration what I call the "dancing in the street crowd," that we just simply will be greeted with open arms,' Lugar said. 'The nonsense of all of that is apparent. The lack of planning is apparent.'US senators weren't the only ones critical of the effort in Iraq. In an article in the Guardian newspaper, US journalist Sydney Blumenthal (who was one of the first journalists to report on the torture of Iraq prisoners by US soliders at Abu Ghraib prison) quoted "leading strategists and prominent retired generals" who told him the "war is all but lost."

Retired general William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency [under the first President Bush], told me [Sydney Blumenthal]: "Bush hasn't found the WMD. Al Qaeda, it's worse, he's lost on that front. That he's going to achieve a democracy there? That goal is lost, too. It's lost." He adds: "Right now, the course we're on, we're achieving Bin Laden's ends." Retired general Joseph Hoare, the former marine commandant and head of US Central Command, told me: "The idea that this is going to go the way these guys planned is ludicrous. There are no good options. We're conducting a campaign as though it were being conducted in Iowa, no sense of the realities on the ground. It's so unrealistic for anyone who knows that part of the world. The priorities are just all wrong."The above sentiments are greatly at odds with those of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who last Friday told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington that as far as the war on terror and Iraq were concerned "so far, so good ..."

'The Taliban regime is gone. Those still not killed or captured are on the run. Despite a campaign of violence and intimidation, over 10 million Afghans have registered to vote, including 4 million women . . . And they've registered to vote in what will be the first free election in that country's history. Saddam Hussein's regime is finished. His sons are dead. He's in a prison cell, where he awaits the justice of the Iraqi people, which he will soon face. Libya has said now that it is renouncing its illicit weapons programs, and it says it will cooperate with the efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction and that it's seeking to reenter the community of civilized nations. Time will tell, but so far, so good ...'The administration's positions on Iraq took another hit on Monday, however, when Secretary of State Colin Powell told a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee meeting that it was unlikely that any weapons of mass destruction would ever be found in Iraq. Mr. Powell further "shocked" his audience when he said that "some US intelligence officials knew that many of the claims about weapons and terrorist ties were suspect" at the time he gave his speech to the United Nations saying Iraq had WMD, but they didn't tell him or other officials about their doubts.

Powell also said on Sunday that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was "linked in any way" with the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, a position that puts him at odds with statements repeatedly made by Vice President Dick Cheney that Mr. Hussein could have been involved.