The international community has a responsibility to protect people at serious harm from state failure, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said in a document circulated to world leaders attending a London conference on "progressive governance" and leaked to a British paper.
The Independent on Sunday reported the document was a way for Blair to justify the war against Iraq even if Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction are never found.
The document, circulated to Western leaders from fellow center-left nations, contains the following paragraph, "When a population is suffering serious harm, as a result of internal war, insurgency or state failure, and the state in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect."
The Independent further claimed the document has provoked a fierce row between Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is attending the conference and who firmly opposed the Iraq war in the absence of a UN resolution authorizing force.
In May, the BBC reported that a British government dossier on Iraq in September was "sexed up" to help justify military action. Against the wishes of intelligence chiefs, the government inserted the claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes, the BBC claimed.
Hans Blix, who served as the UN weapons chief inspector in Iraq in the run-up to war, told The Independent on Sunday that the 45 minute claim was "a fundamental mistake", adding that it was "highly unlikely that there were any means of delivering biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes."
"I don't know exactly how they calculated this figure of 45 minutes in the dossier of September last year. That seems pretty far off the mark to me," Blix said. (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
