Blix challenges legal authority for Iraq war

3.00pm - By ANNE PENKETH in Stockholm and ANDREW GRICE in London

The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has challenged the legal authority on which the US and Britain went to war in Iraq, dealing a fresh blow to Tony Blair, the British prime minister.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Mr Blix said: "I don't buy the argument that the war was legalised by the Iraqi violation of earlier resolutions."

His comments undermined the essential plank of the Government's argument highlighted by the Attorney-General, Lord Goldsmith, in his now controversial advice to the Prime Minister.

Today an unrepentant Mr Blair will refuse to apologise for the war in a major speech in which he will insist the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein in power.

He will point to the wider benefits of the Iraq conflict, citing Libya's decision to give up its weapons of mass destruction, but warn that the world cannot turn a blind eye to the continuing threat from WMD.

Mr Blix demolished the argument advanced by Lord Goldsmith, which stated that resolution 1441 authorised the use of force because it revived earlier UN resolutions passed after the 1991 ceasefire.

Lord Goldsmith published a short summary of his legal opinion on March 17 last year, enabling the Government to go to war on the basis of resolution 1441, adopted in November 2002, rather than with a second resolution explicitly authorising force.

Mr Blix said that while it was possible to argue that Iraq had breached the ceasefire by violating UN resolutions adopted since 1991, the "ownership" of the resolutions rested with the entire 15-member Council and not with individual states.

"It's the Security Council that is party to the ceasefire, not the UK and US individually, and therefore it is the Council that has ownership of the ceasefire, in my interpretation."

To challenge that interpretation would set a dangerous precedent: "Then any individual member could take a view - the Russians could take one view, the Chinese could take another, they could be at war with each other, theoretically."

The Attorney-General's opinion has come under fresh scrutiny since the sudden collapse of the trial against the GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun last week, prompting calls for his full advice to be made public.

Mr Blix, who is an international lawyer by training, said: "I would suspect that there is a more sceptical view than those two A4 pages," in a reference to Clare Short's contemptuous description of the 358-word summary.

It emerged on Wednesday that a Foreign Office memo sent to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on the same day as the Goldsmith summary was published made clear that there was no "automaticity" in resolution 1441 to justify war.

Asked whether in his view a second resolution authorising force should have been adopted, Mr Blix replied: "Oh yes."

In the interview, ahead of next week's publication of his book "Disarming Iraq: the search for weapons of mass destruction", Mr Blix dismissed the suggestion that Mr Blair should resign or apologise over the allies' failure to find any WMD in Iraq.

But he suggested that the Prime Minister may have been fatally wounded by his loss of credibility, and that voters would deliver their verdict.

"Some people say Bush and Blair should be put before a tribunal, and I say that you have the punishment in the political field here," said the Swedish arms expert.

"Their credibility has been affected by this: Bush too lost some credibility."

He repeated accusations that both the US and British governments had been guilty of "hyping" intelligence, and of a lack of critical thinking.

"They used exclamation marks instead of question marks.

"I have some understanding for that. Politicians have to simplify in order to explain, they also have to act in this world before they have 100 per cent evidence. But I think they went further than that."

"But I never said they had acted in bad faith," he added. "Perhaps it was worse that they acted out of good faith."

The threat allegedly posed by Saddam's WMD was the prime reason cited by the British government for going to war. But not a single item of banned weaponry has yet been found in the 11 months that have followed the declared end of hostilities.

Mr Blair will argue that similar decisive action will need to be taken in future to combat the threat of rogue states and terrorists obtaining WMD, saying the world cannot drop its guard because Iraq has been dealt with.

Mr Blair's speech in his Sedgefield constituency is a recognition that he has failed to turn the political spotlight away from Iraq on to domestic issues, despite his repeated attempts to draw a line under the conflict.

He has been forced into a change of strategy by the collapse of the court case against Ms Gun, Ms Short's allegations that Britain spied on the UN secretary general Kofi Annan and Tuesday's suicide bombings in Iraq.

Mr Annan called in the British ambassador to the UN yesterday to discuss the alleged bugging.

Mr Blair's official spokesman said the Prime Minister wanted to put the Iraq issue "into a wider context and make a rounded argument on weapons proliferation and international security threats." He conceded that the Government was "not in charge" of the political debate.

Ministers are gloomy that Mr Blair's speech will achieve "closure" over Iraq.

One said: "It is proving very difficult to move on. We have got to make the case all over again from first principles and remind people of the wider context."

The Prime Minister is expected to stick firmly to his refusal to publish Lord Goldsmith's full advice.

Ministers deny the Gun case was dropped because the full version would have emerged in court and revealed doubts about the legal base for military action.

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