Forty years ago, US warplanes bombed Libya, attempting to assassinate its leader Muammar Gaddafi. Failing in that task, they managed to kill dozens of civilians in Tripoli, Libya’s capital.

The attacks, which were in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub blamed on Gaddafi, were strongly supported by Margaret Thatcher’s government. Indeed, she allowed some of the US jets to take off from bases in Britain.  

In the face of widespread public opposition to the US raid, a defiant Thatcher told parliament it was “a necessary and proportionate response to a clear pattern of Libyan terrorism” and to “uphold international law”.

However, the UN General Assembly, and most world opinion, condemned the attack as a violation of international law. 

But for the British prime minister: “The United States has stood by us in times of need, as we have stood by her. To refuse their request for the use of bases here would have been to abandon our responsibilities as an ally and to weaken the fight against terrorism.”

Fast forward two decades, and we find ourselves in a not dissimilar situation over US attacks on Venezuela. 

UK ministers give their backing to the kidnapping of a foreign head of state amidst a military intervention, condemned in the wider world but supported in Whitehall because of the so-called “special relationship”.

‘Our full support’

It was always thus. Three years after the attack on Libya, the US invaded Panama in December 1989. US aggression killed up to 3,000 people in this instance, and overthrew President Manuel Noriega, who had been on the CIA’s payroll for decades.

The invasion was widely considered to be illegal and in violation of the charters of both the UN and the Organization of American States.

A Foreign Office legal adviser wrote on the day of the invasion that “it is not possible to conclude that the American action was justified in international law”.

This didn’t matter in the British corridors of power. In a private phone call, Thatcher assured US president George W Bush that the intervention “was a very courageous decision which would have our full support”.

In the days that followed, Britain even vetoed a UN Security Council resolution which “strongly deplores” the invasion.

Clinton/Blair double act

A change in leadership in London and Washington made little difference to this pattern in the 1990s when the double act became Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

In August 1998, Clinton launched a wave of cruise missile attacks on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for Al Qaeda’s bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania earlier that month.

Al Qaeda’s bombings were horrific, killing over 300 people. But while the US retaliation struck terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, its target in Sudan was a pharmaceuticals factory that produced medicines for the country’s population. 

The US claimed the plant was manufacturing chemical weapons but no strong evidence ever emerged for this. 

Amid the controversy, Bill Clinton blocked proposals for a UN investigation into the matter while Tony Blair strongly backed his ally’s attacks — against the advice of some British diplomats reportedly being appalled at them.

‘Proper legal authority’

It was only a few months later, in December 1998, that Bill and Tony worked even more closely together in a new bombing campaign. 

They authorised four days of air strikes on Iraq, ostensibly to degrade dictator Saddam Hussein’s ability to store and produce weapons of mass destruction (which, of course, never materialised).

The declassified files show that Blair and his closest advisers were consistently informed by UK legal advisers that attacking Iraq would not be lawful. 

The only exception would be if a new UN Security Council resolution were to be passed saying Saddam was in “material breach” of Iraq’s previous commitments – which London and Washington never secured.

In a sign of Blair’s attitude towards legal requirements, he privately wrote at the time that he found his law officers’ legal advice “unconvincing”.

When he announced military action to parliament in November 1998, Blair misled the house by saying: “I have no doubt that we have the proper legal authority, as it is contained in successive Security Council resolution documents”.

‘Act of war’

Over 20 years later, it was the turn of Boris Johnson to acquiesce to Donald Trump in an overtly illegal US act of aggression.

In January 2020, Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds force, a branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which the US had designated a terrorist organisation.

Washington tried to justify the killing by claiming it had intelligence that Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on US interests across the Middle East. 

But a UN report found that the assassination was illegal. Indeed, the then UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Agnes Callamard, said it marked a watershed in international law. 

“It is hard to imagine that a similar strike against a Western military leader would not be considered as an act of war, potentially leading to intense action, political, military and otherwise, against the State launching the strike”, she wrote.

By contrast, Johnson defended the US action and said that “we will not lament” Soleimani’s death. He added that “the strict issue of legality is not for the UK to determine since it was not our operation” — precisely what Keir Starmer has just said about Venezuela. 

London’s support for Washington also came in the form of Johnson’s equally belligerent foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, who added that the US “had a right to exercise self-defence”.

Bombing Iran

Trump attacked Iran again after Keir Starmer had been in office for nearly a year. In June last year, the US launched air strikes on nuclear-related sites in the country, ostensibly to prevent Tehran developing a nuclear arms programme.

A group of UN experts condemned the intervention, stating: “These attacks violate the most fundamental rules of world order since 1945 – the prohibition on the aggressive use of military force and the duties to respect sovereignty and not to coercively intervene in another country.” 

Yet Starmer’s response was a rehearsal of his reaction to Trump’s recent kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela. The British prime minister failed to condemn the US intervention, instead going along with it by saying it was “clear Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”.

Similarly, foreign secretary David Lammy was repeatedly asked whether the US attacks were illegal, and refused to say. 

Backing the law by violating it

By the time the US under Trump overthrew the Venezuelan government earlier this month, the UK response was utterly predictable. 

Starmer and other ministers welcomed Maduro’s overthrow, failed to identify it as an obvious violation of international law and even had the audacity to claim they remained strong supporters of that law.  

Foreign secretary Yvette Cooper said in a parliamentary debate on Venezuela that “we will always argue for the upholding of international law”, precisely at a time she was supporting an obvious violation of it.

It was the same with her deputy. A day after telling parliament she welcomed the illegal US removal of Maduro, foreign minister Jenny Chapman told parliament the UK’s “support for international law… is unwavering”. 

Maduro’s kidnapping was strongly condemned by UN experts while its human rights chief, Volker Turk, said it “violates the country’s sovereignty and the UN charter”.

This failed to deter the UK immediately proceeding with military collaboration with Trump’s rogue state. Four days after the kidnapping, the UK provided military support to Washington to help it seize a Russian-flagged oil tanker near the northwest waters of the UK. 

Declassified asked legal experts to comment on Trump’s latest military intervention and many are concluding it is yet another violation. 

The decades-long cycle goes on. The US and UK have long been repeatedly undermining what exists of a rules-based international order – while claiming to uphold it. 

Who knows where it will lead us in terms of future wars and what price will be paid by ordinary people for the world’s leading states creating a global law of the jungle.

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