5 |
Advice on the legal basis for military action, November 2002 to
March 2003
made their
position abundantly clear to the French, the US lawyers had been
unable
to
find a statement from the French acknowledging that a second
resolution would not
479.
Asked if he
should also have sought the views of the French, Lord
Goldsmith
replied:
“No I
couldn’t do that. I plainly could not have done that … because,
there we were,
plainly by
this stage, in a major diplomatic stand-off between the United
States and
France …
you couldn’t have had the British Attorney General being seen to go
to the
French to
ask them ‘What do you think?’ The message that that would have
given
Saddam
Hussein about the degree of our commitment would have been
huge.”194
480.
Others had a
different view.
481.
Mr Straw
told the Inquiry that if Lord Goldsmith “had asked to talk to the
French,
of course,
we would have facilitated that … I have no recollection of that
ever being
raised with
me at all”.195
482.
Asked about
Lord Goldsmith’s evidence that he could not speak to French
officials
about the
interpretation of resolution 1441, Sir John Holmes, British
Ambassador to
France from
2002 to 2007, replied:
“I don’t
see why he couldn’t have done, or at least somebody else ask the
question
on his
behalf. But I think what is true is that the French were, again,
very wary about
ever saying
what their own legal position was. They took a very strong
political
position
about no automaticity … but they were very careful, I don’t
remember them
ever
actually saying what their own legal position was.”196
483.
Asked whether
the legal position would have mattered as much to the French as
it
did to us,
Sir John responded: “No because the automatic assumption
increasingly was
that they
weren’t going to be part of it.”197
484.
Mr Straw
told the Foreign Affairs Committee on 4 March that it was “a
matter
of fact”
that Iraq had been in material breach “for some weeks” and
resolution
1441
provided sufficient legal authority to justify military action
against Iraq if it
was “in
further material breach”.
193
Letter
Brenton to Adams, 13 February 2003, ‘Attorney General’s Visit to
Washington’.
194
Public
hearing, 27 January 2010, page 115.
195
Public
hearing, 8 February 2010, page 31.
196
Public
hearing, 29 June 2010, page 32.
197
Public
hearing, 29 June 2010, page 32.
87