The Chilcot Inquiry, Aggression and the International Criminal Court
29 July 2010 The 2003 U.S. led invasion of Iraq was a crime--a profound and catastrophic violation of international law.
The crime was aggression: the waging of unprovoked war on a sovereign state.
A growing international consensus says that not only was the invasion illegal, but in the future such crimes will result in direct and severe personal consequences for leaders who organize the killing and give the orders to start.
Two recent developments, in London and in Kampala, Uganda, highlight this movement away from impunity and towards personal responsibility for aggression--referred to in the judgement of the first Nuremberg trial in 1946 as “…the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
In London, the British inquiry into the Iraq war--the Chilcot inquiry--has produced powerful testimony from leading ex-government figures that Operation Iraqi Freedom was illegal. Continued
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