This story - I quit because the war against Iraq was illegal, says former government lawyer - is surely yet further proof of how shaky even the basic legal justification of the Iraq war really was. Quite frankly, I believe the Afghan war was illegal too. Did Afghanistan attack America?

Al Qaeda (if it was they) did not commit an act of war against the US as they are terrorists. They can only commit politically motivated criminal acts. The US wanted Bin Laden handed over. The Taleban wanted evidence before they did so (this is called extradition and is standard procedure around the world). The US refused to provide proof so the Taleban refused to send Bin Laden to America. So the US, with a few pals, invaded Afghanistan.

As Chomsky pointed out, this is a "do what we want or else we attack you" scenario. Or terrorism in any other vocabulary. The Taleban were evil, hateful religious thugs but the US government is not so it should not do hateful, thuggish things in the name of justice.

Afghanistan is still an expensive hell hole and Bin Laden is still free. Iraq was never a danger to anyone anymore, let alone the US and now is it a political source of much hatred in the Arab world and a pot into which every fanatic and Iraqi nationalist has poured its paramilitary resources. Both were sovereign countries who had never attacked the US militarily. Iraq had fought wars but never against democracies and in one of those two wars America helped it.

The irony is that the Gulf War was ostensibly about protecting Kuwait's sovereignty (because the dictator king was reinstalled after the war) and yet this second war completely breaks the rules about invading sovereign countries pre-emptively. The war was not about humanitarian reasons (Wolfowitz and Blair freely stated that) - certainly this alone is not enough in the perpetrators eyes to justify the war. It would make no sense if it was as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan are allies (they have appalling human rights records). The war was not about WMD as there weren't any and many experts suspected that even if they did, they weren't particularly dangerous. Even those who said he was a "threat" really meant that he hated the west and wouls hurt them if he could. But he couldn't. Colin Powell said before 9/11 that his capability had not been restored. In fact, it turns out that Libya was much nearer to WMD than Iraq ever was post 1991.

My own theory about the crap western governments were fed about WMD was stuff they received from the Iraqi National Congress and the like who funnelled defectors and their testimonies to the CIA and British to encourage an invasion (after all, they wanted power). This seems to have worked really well. When a fired up Bush was advised by the CIA that this sort of uncorroborated "evidence" was at best not something to be termed as fact Bush didn't want to hear and kept repeating this drivel. Colin Powell, to the UN, said his presentation was based on hard and reliable intelligence. Apparently not.

The war was not about terrorism as Saddam had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.

So what are we left with? We're left with this: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm