The (il)legality of the Iraq War of 2003: An Analytical Review of the Causes and Justifications for the US-led invasion

Abstract This study aims to establish whether the 2003 Iraq war was waged within the confines of United Nations (UN) Charter rules. To achieve this, the study analyses the circumstances under which armed force in international relations (IR) may be used within the provisions of the UN Charter. In the wake of the contentious US-led war in Iraq, critics opine that the UN thresholds for waging war were not met by the US and its allies. The US argued that the war was justified given the unprecedented security challenges occasioned mainly by 9/11. Crucially, post 9/11, US re-ordering of international security fed on the narrative that preventative strikes against states that it suspected to be potential havens for terrorist activities (the so-called rogue states) was within the broader UN Charter parameters of self-defence. Using the UN Security Council Resolutions (SCRs) on Iraq and the UN Charter rules on warfare as a framework of analysis, this study navigates the causal factors and justifications for and against the Iraq war. The study concludes that although the US faced security challenges and arguably had fathomable reasons, the invasion of Iraq was conducted without UN authorisation, and hence in defiance of the UN Charter rules.


PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT
This study aimed to evaluate whether the US-led Iraq war of 2003 was waged within the confines of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) rules on the use of armed force. From the early 1990s up to 2001, the US faced a compendium of security challenges that threatened their interests both at home and abroad.
For the US, 9/11 was a tipping point for the reordering of its foreign policy on international security. These US security challenges were happening at the backdrop of Iraq's weak cooperation with the UN and abrogations of the Security Council resolutions on its disarmament program that stretched back from 1991.
Understandably, the post-9/11 psychological trauma that the US faced fed on the narrative that pariah states such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Sudan were potential havens for terrorist activities that would at some future point harm the US, hence the need to tame them before another potential calamity could strike US interests.
The study, however, finds that the US's justifications for the war contravened the UN Charter rules, and hence rendered the war illegal under international law.
Machiavellian ends. This helps the reader to realise that reliance on the UN for solutions on wars will continue to be a tall order for a foreseeable future.
(4) The study provides a detailed series of security-related events that took place both in the US and in Iraq between 1991 and 2003. These events which other studies have not comprehensively captured offer a richer embodiment of diagnostic ideas on why the US may have waged the war outside the UN Charter rules. These sequenced events (between 1991 and 2003) together with an exploration-through the literature review-of expansionist great power politics provide an enlarged lens for the reader to grasp the Iraq war of 2003 with greater definition.
Put simply, the unveiling of the juxtaposes summarised above makes this study a notable contribution to the literature which other studies have not conscientiously outlined within a single paper.
International law is the basis upon which the UN was founded, and its main objective is to maintain order in the international community for peace and security to prevail. Since states are required to consent to the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945), they are bound by its rules which are also part of customary international law (Lepard, 2010). Shaw (2003) points out that: . . . international law regulates the states in the international community which are under a general obligation to act in conformity with the established and generally agreed rules of international law and will bear responsibility for breaches of it . . . This means that states cannot use their national laws as a basis for settling international disputes.
In 1997, before George W. Bush ascended to the presidency, a neoconservative group, the Project for the New American Century, emerged with ambitions of expanding the US global hegemony through a vigorous foreign policy agenda that was anchored on military strength (Fukuyama, 2006). This group consisted of influential politicians from the US Republican political party such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, and Paul Wolfowitz. One of the key objectives was to use all levers of the US government's power to rid the world of rogue regimes that were perceived to be a threat to the US and to its global interests, particularly in the oil-rich Middle East. In 1998, this group of neoconservatives signed a petition to then President Bill Clinton calling for regime change in Iraq's Saddam Hussein following Iraqi's long episode of uncooperative attitude towards several UN Security Council resolutions dating back to 1990 (Mahajan, 2003).

A compendium of US security challenges prior to the Iraq war
In 1992, the US sent a contingent of special forces to Somalia as part of its efforts to support the United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II) which was tasked to assist to bring an end to the devastating Somali civil war and establish democratic governance. However, efforts to restore a stable government were being resisted by a Somali rebel group led by warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid (Von Hippel, 2000).
In 1993, a fierce fight ensued which was dubbed, "the battle of Mogadishu" between the rebels and the UNOSOM II forces (in collaboration with US marines) which ended in the deaths of 18 US troops and left several others wounded. The skirmishes also left over 300 Somalis dead and several hundreds wounded. The US suspected al-Qaeda operatives to have been behind the material support to the Somali rebels (The New York Times, 25 October 1993).
In 1998, the simultaneous bombings of two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania solidified the neoconservative's claims that terrorist activities paused a real security threat to the US interests across the globe. The US retaliated through its missile attacks on suspected targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a catalogue of accusations of suspected states that the US believed were collaborating with terrorists continued to feature in mainstream US political rhetoric which subsequently put Iraq and Afghanistan top on the US hit list (Byers, 2002).
In October 2000, a US navy missile destroyer, the USS Cole, was hit by suspected suicide terrorists, while it was refuelling at a port in Yemen. The FBI assessed that the bombing was carried out by al-Qaeda operatives (US Department of Justice, 2003).
So, the events of 9/11 came at the backdrop of sequences of various terrorist-related activities that threatened the US and its interests. The US fears of additional potential terrorist activities were exacerbated by a shopping list of the Iraq regimes' failures to comply with several UN Security Council resolutions stretching back from 1990. These SRCs demanded that Iraq ends its hostile disposition towards its neighbours, particularly Kuwait, and to cooperate with UN inspectors on its suspected program of stockpiling the WMD (United Nations, 2004). There seemed to be a consensus by Western intelligence that Iraq was concealing WMD. To consolidate their WMD claims, the CIA, working in what appeared to be a collusion with a former Italian military intelligence agency, concocted a uranium procurement intelligence report in 2001 against Iraq. The aim of the purported uranium account was to implicate the Iraqi authorities and depict them as a regime that was actively stockpiling yellow cake (uranium) from Niger. The idea to implicate Iraq at the peak of its disarmament crisis with the UN was strategically positioned to destroy the regimes' credibility in the eyes of the international community. However, these yellow cake claims were dismissed by UN weapon inspectors on grounds that the reports were not authentic (The Washington Post, 22 March 2019).
Despite the CIA not being able to provide credible evidence on the WMD in Iraq, the US government seemed determined to invade Iraq at any cost. Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Défense at the time of the Iraq crisis, argued that the war against Iraq would be pursued despite the lack of concreate evidence because according to him, "the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" (Mahajan, 2003). In April 2002, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a staunch ally of the Bush administration, issued a scathing statement in which he accused Iraq of developing WMD which he believed had been acquired over a long period of time-actions that constituted security threats that could not be ignored by the international community (Cook, 2004).
Similarly, in his State of the Union Address in January 2003, President George W. Bush accused Saddam Hussein of attempting to procure dangerous chemicals to produce nuclear weapons of mass destruction. President Bush stressed that the gravest danger in the war on terror was outlaw regimes (such as Iraq) that possessed chemical and biological weapons that may end up in the hands of terrorists (Sherry, 2005).
Thus, post 9/11 US international security policy was essentially premised on the narrative that countries -considered by the US as rogue states-such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya may potentially have been collaborating with suspected terrorist networks (The White House Union Address, 2003). Therefore, the growth and sustainability of terror cells around the world were effectively linked to these states, and this narrative seemed to have obliterated these countries' political credibility in many Western capitals. Compared to Afghanistan, the US believed that Iraq posed more threats due to its perceived military strength. The US observed that in Iraq, it could cause the kind of colossal impact that could make all other suspected terroristsponsoring states around the world to rethink their policies (Feith, 2009).

Methodology
The aim of this research is to find out whether the 2003 Iraq war was conducted within the confines of the UN Charter rules. To get these answers, an exploratory study was adopted with data that were gathered from primary and secondary sources of inquiry consisting of the UN Charter rules, the UNSC resolutions on Iraq, journal articles, textbooks, and online publications.
Three criteria were employed to arrive at the summary conclusions of the arguments as follows: (1) Scrutinization of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) Article 51 which allows the use of force in self-defence and gauge whether the US invasion met this criterion.
(2) Examination of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) Article 24 and Article 42 which empowers the UNSC to authorise the use of force and evaluate whether the controversial 2002 SCR 1441 on Iraq provided such authorisation.
(3) Assessment of whether the Humanitarian intervention concept under the UN notion of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) was warranted in the Iraq situation. Precisely, Article 38 (1) (b) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) acknowledges custom (in this context, the R2P forms part of that custom) as one of the systems which states have accepted to be part of their rules. This comes through state practice even in unwritten form, and regardless of whether states have been party to other treaties (Lepard, 2010).
The numerous UNSC resolutions on Iraq were also examined because Article 24 of the UN Charter (1945) guides that to ensure effective action by the UN, all member states have given the UNSC, "primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security, and members have agreed that in carrying out its duties, the UNSC will act on their behalf" (UN Charter, United Nations, 1945).
However, the study's main limitation is the fact that it does not have a comparative analysis of other wars such as the 2011 Libya invasion, the 2011 Syrian civil war, or the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. The comparative analyses may have provided more clarity on the machinations of great power politics. However, given that this paper is already voluminous, it could not accommodate additional literature. Future studies may, therefore, focus on this gap by developing a comparative analysis study.

The influence of ideology on the use of force in IR
Classical realists such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, E.H. Carr, and Hans Morgenthau assert that IR is a never-ending struggle between the economically powerful and those that are economically weak. Realists' policies are driven by self-interest which are embedded in the politics of selfhelp and great power crusading (Morgenthau, 1948). Realists argue that universal moral values cannot be applied to the acts of a state. This implies that in realism, there is no moral proportion: for the realist, a goal that yields positive results is a right goal, while a goal that produces unsuccessful results is assumed to be a wrong goal (Carr, 1939).
Realism also posit that the world is in a state of anarchy due to the absence of a central authority, and as such, IR needs to focus on the most powerful actors (states) in the international system. However, realism could not predict the emergence of non-state actors as critical elements in the shaping of IR. It is argued that statism fundamentally blurred IR policymakers from anticipating the threats of non-state actors. John Mearsheimer, a leading IR scholar acknowledges that the scientific approach through the realist prism indeed failed to envisage this threat (Sobrero, 2022).
During the Iraq war of 2003, scholars offer varied positions on the (il)legality of the invasion. It can be argued, however, that most IR scholars seem to hold the view that the war was waged outside the UN Charter rules on warfare. Scholars such as Mearsheimer and Walt (2003), Paulus (2004), Simpson (2005), and Hinnebusch (2007), assert that the war was illegal. Kramer and Michalowski (2005) posit that the Iraq war was a state crime, that the US officials who executed the invasion committed war crimes. Sands (2005) opines that the US and Britain in the 21 st century have largely turned their backs on a world order that emphasise the importance of upholding the UN Charter rules-a new world order which both helped to create in the past century. International rules that administer the laws of war, human rights and torture were not respected by the Bush Administration as evidenced, for instance, by the torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib detention camps.

UN Charter rules on warfare vs real politics on the use of force in IR
However, John Yoo argues in support of the Bush torture ploys: That the prisoner of war status under The Geneva Conventions (1949) did not apply to enemy soldiers captured during the war period and detained at Guantanamo prison. The main thrust being that treaties do not protect members of terrorist or militia groups because as non-State actors, terror organisations cannot be party to international agreements governing war (Yoo, 2009).
Further, Yoo (2009) posit that executive authority of the US president during war time permitted enhanced techniques of interrogation and that wiretapping programs under war times did not require arrest warrants. Also, under these extended powers, the US presidential privileges and authority far exceed the limits of peace times decrees. Wedgwood (2003) and Taft et al. (2017) contend that preventative use of force is not illegal where such action is consistent with the demands of UNSC resolutions, such as was the case with SCR 1441 which had warned Iraq of "serious consequences" if it was found to be in material breach of the terms of SCR 1441. This position is further supported by Wedgwood (2017) who argues that even if the probability was negligible that an outlaw state could succeed in striking the US with chemical and biological weapons, the potential harm that such WMD could cause anywhere else would make the idea of preventative military action justifiable. Kress (2019) asserts that the ban on the use of force under the article 2(4) of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) has continued to be severely challenged by great power politics. This paucity surrounding article 2(4) has led to some actors arguing that the ban on the use of force for non-aggressive intensions such as to stop heinous human rights violations lies outside the scope of this UN proscription. Further, great power political machinations seem to suggest that for this UN ban on the use of force to hold, the UNSC must proactively fulfil its obligations by ensuring that it acts firmly and decisively against any potential threats to international peace and security (Kress, 2019). Yoo (2005) points out that the UNSC has not lived up to the expectation of being a decisive body. A catalogue of UN failures is long: for instance, the failure to produce consensus over SCR 1441 on Iraq; the failure to get a common position on Bosnia in 1992, the failure to intervene in the Rwanda genocide of 1994; the failure to stop the troubles in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2003, and the gross misconduct of UN peacekeepers of (widespread) raping, mainly of (underage) women in various peace keeping missions, most notably, in the DR Congo.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan argued in a report, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All, that the UNSC decision-making could be enhanced by restructuring the Council to expand representation from all regions of the globe.
Contrary to Annan's view, Yoo (2005) argues that the expansion of the Council would make consensus much more difficult to achieve; that instead, the UN needs to support greater use of force in IR to ensure that rogue states are tamed.
To illustrate further the weakness of article 2 (4) of the UN Charter: in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea; in 2018, the US, Britain and France struck Syria through air attacks. In 2019, the US recognised Israel's seizure of the Golan Heights, a territory of Syria (Kress, 2019). More recently, in 2022, Russia launched an assault on Ukraine. In all these cases mentioned, there appeared to be no concreate attempt by the war perpetrators to justify these conflagrations and wars of aggression under the rules of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945).
In addition, Kress (2019) opines that criminalisation of a war of aggression is politically controversial because such outlawing denies populations such as those under colonisation or any other forms of oppression to gain their freedoms through outside (military) support. Removing colonialism and any other forms of oppression needs to be considered as a noble cause, and therefore, a matter of higher justice.

The potential role of orientalism on the use of force in IR
Samuel Huntington's seemingly "self-fulfilling" prophesy in the Clash of Civilisations in which he opined those international conflicts would be centred on the interface of Western and non-Western civilisations seems to be a living reality in IR today. This reality also brings into the equation, the role of Orientalism in influencing wars of aggression (Oezel, 2015). Edward Said defines Orientalism as an epistemological and ontological thought that is impishly premised on the idea that the Orient are static, uncivilized, and incapable of defending themselves while the Occident are superior beings and therefore, entitled to oversee the political life of the Orient (Said, 1978).
The concept of orientalism is critical to the understanding of the ideology of the US in its international policies. Orientalism mainly emanated from the colonial empires who utilised the concept to embed the idea that the populations of the global south were inferior, backwards, barbaric, and incompetent. Western researchers and media also joined the bandwagon and aided the construction of a hostile image of Eastern (and subaltern) cultures (Said, 1978).
For instance, influential Western scholars such as David Hume, G.W. Hegel, and Charles de Montesquieu ab/used their privileged scholarly positions to implicitly reinforce the notion that Africans and other subalterns are inferior compared to Europeans. It was this deep-seated concept of Othering and the demeaning of the global south populations that seemed to be predominant in the political discourse of the US which the Bush administration exploited to justify their imperial ambitions in Iraq (Simuziya, 2022).
When examining orientalism and its role in US international policies, an important aspect to consider is the influence of the US ideology on the conception of US power. Frederick Jackson Turner elaborates on this idea when he points out that: . . . to understand America, one must understand the expansion of American settlements in the 'Frontier Thesis'. Beginning from the early school years, Americanism becomes firmly ingrained in the hearts and minds of Americans through 'The Pledge of Allegiance', and the belief that America is 'a nation chosen by God', the shining 'city upon a hill'. On visits to America in the 1830s, Alex de Tocqueville observed that Americans were concerned about their country's interests as if they were their own, with feelings towards the homeland being comparable to what a person feels for his or her family (Nouri, 2021). Nouri (2021) argues that a study of elite theory analysis and post-colonialism in the context of the US international policies conclude that the Iraq war of 2003 was driven by US elite agendas with cooperate elite interests-all under the cover of promoting democracy in the Middle East. Also, the US foreign policy has tended to tilt towards an inclination that seem to suggest that every political problem in the global south requires (military) intervention from the West (Simuziya, 2021). Jackson (2005) elucidates how constructed knowledge and the (manipulative) use of terrorism language plays an important role in justifying wars of aggression. To further illustrate the influence of Orientalism in the US political discourse, reflect this statement by George W. Bush on Afghanistan when he stated that: . . . in the battle of Afghanistan, we destroyed one of the most barbaric regimes in the history of mankind. A regime so barbaric, they would not allow young girls to go to school. A regime so barbaric, they were willing to house Al Qaeda (Nouri, 2021).
This account and comparison between the civilized world and the barbaric subaltern demonstrate how tales of Orientalism and typecasts are banded into descriptions of the subaltern populations of the global south. This also shows the pivotal role of Orientalist knowledge production in facilitating the imperial drives of marauding superpowers: Orientalist discourse was crucial in bypassing, legitimising, and expanding the meaning and application of international law on Iraq. Orientalist knowledge, therefore, played a key role in subverting the UN Charter rules on warfare (Nouri, 2021).
Political analysts such as Soros and Ganeshananthan (2003), Paulus (2004), and Bojang (2016) argue that after 9/11, the US ensured that they looked for an excuse to wage the Iraq war. It is envisioned that without 9/11, the war against Iraq would most certainly not have occurred. The US exploited 9/11 to further the Bush doctrine's chauvinist ideology which seemed to believe that powerful states possess more knowledge and know better than other states. Syeda Ali asserts that 9/11 rehabilitated a sense of susceptibility in the US which drove the Bush administration to label suspected terrorist haven nations as "rogue states" and sponsors of terror networks (Ali, 2009). Paulus (2004) opines that while the purported reasons for the war were widely regarded as a sham, scholars need to characterise between the real reasons, the right reasons, the moral reasons, and the stated reasons. This characterisation is aptly explained by Thomas Freidman when he argues that: . . . the real reason for the war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11, America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. The only way was for the American soldiers, men, and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house by house, and to make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to protect our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble (Paulus, 2004).

The international struggle with Iraq
The case of Iraq was not a new phenomenon to the UN and can be traced back to the Persian war between Iraq and Iran which lasted for 8 years, from 1980 to 1988.
In 1988, the UNSC passed SCR 619 of 1988 for a ceasefire which eased the hostilities and allowed for the creation of the United Nations Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group (UNIIMOG; Malone, 2006). However, the Iraqi appetite for war seemed unquenchable as it soon began another war with Kuwait in August 1990. Between August 1990, and November 2002, the UNSC passed several SCRs against Iraq which were initially triggered by the Iraq invasion of Kuwait. The Iraq invasion of Kuwait prompted the UN to authorise the use of armed force through SCR 678 of November 1990, which finally dislodged Iraq forces from Kuwait in March 1991. However, the subsequent UNSC resolutions on Iraq requiring it to maintain international peace and security in that region yielded little compliance results. In April 1991, the UN created the United Nations Iraq-Kuwait Observation Mission (UNIKOM). A catalogue of SCRs that Iraq failed to fully comply with (shown below) shows the consternations that the Iraq regime had fuelled in the international community, particularly in the US. Some of the abrogated UNSC resolutions as compiled by the United Nations (2004) are as follows: 1. UN Resolution 660 (1990), 2 August 1990-this resolution condemned the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and demanded the immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
2. UN Resolution 661 (1990), 6 August 1990-the resolution determined that Iraq had failed to comply with SCR 660 and consequently, the Security Council imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq.
3. UN Resolution 662 (1990), 9 August 1990-this resolution declared void, the annexation of Kuwait by Iraq. (1990), 18 August 1990-this resolution demanded that Iraq permit and facilitate the free movement of third state nationals and reaffirmed its decision in SCR 662 (1990) that the annexation of Kuwait by Iraq was illegal. (1990), 25 August 1990-this resolution imposed a blockade and called on UN member states to enforce a maritime against Iraq.

UN Resolution 665
6. UN Resolution 666 (1990), 13 September 1990-the resolution expressed deep concern that Iraq had failed to comply with its obligations under SCR 664(1990) with respect to the well-being of third state nationals and hence affirmed to keep the humanitarian foodstuff situation under constant review. 7. UN Resolution 667 (1990) 16 September 1990-this resolution demanded that Iraq comply with its previous resolutions and sought to consult to take further measures in response to Iraq's continued violation of the previous SCRs.
8. UN Resolution 669 (1990) 24 September 1990-the resolution requested the Committee on Sanctions to consider requests for economic assistance from countries harmed by the sanctions on Iraq.
9. UN Resolution 670 (1990) 25 September 1990-this resolution strengthened the embargo imposed against Iraq, by only allowing supplies intended strictly for medical purposes or solely for UNIIMOG operations.
10. UN Resolution 674 (1990) 29 October 1990-the resolution reminded Iraq that it was liable for any loss or damage to property for third states, their nationals, and corporations. 11. UN Resolution 677 (1990) 28 November 1990-the resolution ordered Iraq to stop destroying civil records and the register of the Kuwait government and empowered the Secretary General to take charge of the regulations governing access to and the use of the population register.
When the 15 January 1991 deadline was ignored by Iraq, the coalition forces launched military assaults against Iraq. Armed operations were only suspended after Kuwait was liberated in March 1991. In March 1991, the adoption of SCRs on "stubborn" Iraq continued.
14. UN Resolution 687 (1991) 3 April 1991-this resolution declared the ceasefire and set up the conditions of the ceasefire which included the creation of United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) to inspect all suspected sites for the production and stockpiling of WMD while still maintaining the sanctions.
15. UN Resolution 688 (1991) 5 April 1991-the resolution sanctioned the intervention to protect the civilian population of Kurds in Northern Iraq where Kurdish refugees were fleeing Iraqi troops, which prompted the US and the UK to set up no-fly zone areas in Northern Iraq to create safe havens for the Kurds.
16. UN Resolution 1441 8 November 2002-this resolution warned Iraq that it would face serious consequences if it failed to cooperate with the UN weapons inspectors who were to be deployed under an enhanced UN inspections regime to be coordinated, this time around, by the United Nations Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in coordination with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and offered Iraq one "final opportunity" to carry out its international obligations to avoid punishment. Under the terms of SCR 1441, Iraq was warned that any false statements and any omissions to the UN weapons inspectors would amount to a further "material breach" and the UNSC instructed the then Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC Hans Blix, together with then Director-General of the IAEA Mohamed Al Baradei, to immediately report to the UNSC, any noticeable interference of their work by Iraqi officials (Blix, 2004a).

Crisis point: 9/11, the anthrax attacks, and the aftermath
Like any other state, the US had been used to dealing with traditional security threats like those of the Cold War period, typically associated with state-to-state wars. The events of 9/11 seemed to have awakened the US to be alive to the reality that the 21 st century threats could be posed even by non-state armed actors. The 9/11 events and the subsequent anthrax incidences that ensued mainly in Washington DC, in New York city and Florida state, became a turning point for the US responses to global threats. Soon after 9/11, letters laced with anthrax were traced in the US mail system and by the time these biological mail attacks were intercepted, they had already left 5 US citizens dead and infected 17 others (Beard, 2001).
Historically, terrorism was somewhat taken lightly; it was considered a weapon of the weak with limited capabilities that were perceived to require massive military force to make an impact (Huntington, 1996). For the US, preventative military action would be the foremost strategy to adopt since the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) group was, at the material time, no longer considered by the US as a "reliable partner". This was due to the divisions within the EU concerning the question of the course of punitive action that needed to be taken against the obstinate state of Iraq (McGoldrick, 2004).
The precise cause of 9/11 is hard to pinpoint; it can be deduced from the analysis of (Oezel, 2015) that the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1991 created a unipolar power and as such, the power vacuum that was left in the East may have provided a fertile ground for the growth of militant groups that were opposed to the US hegemony. These militant groupsit is argued-would ordinarily have been under the "control" of the USSR since the Soviet Union was the dominant political and military power of the Eastern bloc during the Cold War period.
Another school of thought suggests that the cause of 9/11 was the alleged US-biased handling of the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict which allegedly had angered many Islamic militants. The Islamic fundamentalists believed that the Palestinian territories under Israeli control should be granted independence .
Thus, 9/11 brought a new realisation to the US on how to deal with non-state armed actors and rogue states that were believed to be providing safe havens for terrorists. Afghanistan (under the Taliban regime) and Iraq's Saddam Hussein were identified by the US as major targets in the war on terror. Afghanistan was targeted on accusations of providing safe havens for al-Qaeda operatives while Iraq was earmarked for having failed to prove that it was not stockpiling WMD (Beard, 2001). Beard (2001) points out that other states on the US "hit list" included Iran, which was accused of harbouring nuclear ambitions; Syria was blamed for offering support to radical Islamic militant groups of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Sudan was reported to have hosted al-Qaeda leader Bin Laden between 1991 and 1996 and hence itself culpable of terror crimes. Libya, long known in the West as "pay master of terrorists" was also targeted for the additional sin of its alleged involvement in the Lockerbie plane bombing of 1988 in Scotland which killed 270 people, majority of whom were American and British citizens.
In September 2001, the Bush administration drew up a strategic security blueprint, the National Security Strategy (NSS) (2001), otherwise commonly known as the "Bush doctrine". This plan approved the use of preventative armed force against potential threats globally.
In October 2001, the US Congress passed the Patriot Act of 2001 which President Bush signed into law. The Patriot Act (2001) brought in sweeping powers in the US domestic security and foreign policies. The significance of the Patriot Act (2001) can be summarised in the following 3 ways: (1) The Patriot Act (2001) enhanced surveillance capacities, such as tapping international telephone calls and tightening anti-money laundering operations. This was to be achieved by removing the barrier between law enforcement and the intelligence units to enable them easily share terrorist information.
(2) The Act provided enhanced powers to federal agencies such as the CIA and the FBI in their counter-terrorism operations, such as the indiscriminate collection of data of any person or organisation, including the tightening of border security.
(3) The Act expanded the penalty thresholds for terror crimes, and these included the indefinite detentions without trial of terror suspects, detentions under solitary confinements, the search of any suspected records and properties without the need for a search warrant (Beard, 2001).
These developments provided the US intelligence, the security and defence forces with sufficient apparatus and architecture to apply force as they deemed appropriate.
By implication therefore, both the NSS (2001) and the Patriot Act (2001) reignited and cemented the objectives of the 1997 Project for the New American Century. On 10 November 2001, President Bush, in a fiery speech to the UN General Assembly, warned that terrorists would face justice, that they would be hunted down no matter how long it would take. He further warned that states that sponsor terrorist activities would equally face the consequences. President Bush reiterated that his government would make no distinction between the terrorists and those states that provided safe havens for them (Franck, 2003).
The first casualty of the Bush preventative military strikes was Afghanistan on 7 October 2001. The Taliban regime was easily dislodged from power by US forces who were soon beefed up by the UK forces and later joined by other Western allies.
On 20 March 2003, the Bush administration commenced the offensive military operations against Iraq. The major combat did not last long as the US devised the "shock and awe" strategy, i.e., the application of maximum military force that paralysed major installations including the civilian and non-combat jurisdictions. Within days, Baghdad fell to the coalition forces (Malone, 2006). 6. Arguments and justifications for and against the war-the US, the UK, France, Russia, China, and Germany

Arguments on the use of force under the UNSC authorisation
The perspective of SCR 1441 of November 2002 from the war proponents The US and UK position on SCR 1441 was that Iraq had failed to provide full and unimpeded cooperation to the UN weapons inspectors as required by the UN resolution which had warned of serious consequences if abrogated. As a result of the omissions and commissions on the part of Iraq, the US believed that Saddam Hussein needed to face those consequences (Blix, 2004).
Further, the Americans contended that this was not the first time that Iraq had failed to fulfil its international obligations that the regime's expulsion in 1998 of the UN weapons inspectors point to manoeuvres of a regime attempting to conceal WMD. These events aroused suspicion on Iraq's perceived deception on its disarmament program, hence the need to launch preventative military attacks (Franck, 2003).
The UK, under Prime Minister Tony Blair who was the most important ally of the US on the Iraqi question, added more weight to the calls of invading Iraq. On a visit to the US in April 2002, Prime Minister Blair lamented that in the wake of 9/11, Saddam Hussein could not be left off the hook because he reckoned that Iraq was actively developing WMD. Further, the UK believed that under the principle of collective defence of NATO, an attack on one member state was an attack on all members. By this reasoning then, 9/11 was an attack on all NATO member states (Ramesh, 2003).
The Blix Report to the UNSC of 27 January 2003, operating under the mandate of UNMOVIC in collaboration with the IAEA acknowledged that cooperation levels with Iraq on the inspection work had improved but remained unsatisfactory. The report explicitly stated that the Iraqi authorities had not offered full cooperation to the UN inspectors. As such, the Blix team (UNMOVIC) could not categorically rule out the possibility of the availability of WMD; and because of this uncertainty, Blix asked the UNSC to give the inspectors more time so that they could produce a thorough report. This development alone-of weak Iraq cooperation-strengthened the argument by the pro-war advocates that nothing could be ruled-out on Saddam Hussein's intentions on the biological weapon programs (Malone, 2006). Due to this uncertainty by UNMOVIC, Malone (2006) opines that the Americans felt that the idea of giving Iraq "more time" despite Iraq's poor record of compliance (over the years) seemed to defy logic. The US feared that further extensions to Iraq would amount to offering the regime "enough time" to conceal and deceive. Put simply, Iraq was perceived to be playing cat-andmouse games with the UN inspectors.
The US also contended that SCR 1441 did not weaken or replace any previous UN resolutions, arguing, for instance, that SCR 678 of November 1990 and SCR 687 of April 1991 were still enforceable since they equally had been abrogated. The US believed that although a second UN resolution (to follow SCR 1441) was politically desirable, it was not legally necessary. Suggestions by critics of the war that the use of force against Iraq would be illegal unless the UNSC made a fresh decision were dismissed by the Bush administration. The US argued that such a requirement would amount to discounting the logic of SCR 678 and SCR 687 whose authority -the US contended-was renewed in SCR 1441 (Robert, 2003). The US argued that the terms of SCR 1441 had warned Iraq of "serious consequences" to be suffered if it failed to comply fully; so, this determination in advance (of the consequences), was as good as a determination afterwards. This position was further consolidated by the UK Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith's legal advice to Prime Minister Blair in March 2003, in which he found legal justification for the war without the need to have a second UN resolution. However, it was perplexing that until February 2003, Lord Goldsmith held the view that waging the war without a second UN resolution would be unlawful. So, this surprising "change of mind" by Goldsmith appeared to have been swayed after the Blair government arranged that Goldsmith consult with US officials on the legal status of the looming war (The Iraq Inquiry, 2009).
After his consultations with US officials, Goldsmith changed his long-held opinion (that the war without a second UN resolution would be illegal) and instead provided a contradictory verdict that now suggested that a second UN resolution was not legally necessary for purposes of commencing the war. According to Goldsmith, the authority to use armed force under the terms of SCR 678 of 1990 was only suspended in SCR 687 of 1991 but not terminated and therefore, the subsequent resolutions including SCR 1441 did not weaken that authority, which was now rekindled through a subsequent resolution, the SCR1441 (McGoldrick, 2004).

The perspective of SCR 1441 from the anti-war critics
Critics of the war led by France, Russia, China, and Germany argued to the contrary that SCR 1441 was the only credible reference resolution at that point in time; that on its own, SCR 1441 did not authorise the use of armed force as there was no "automaticity" of the use of armed force contained in it (Short, 2005).
This interpretation meant that the UNSC needed to reconvene to assess the Iraqi failures on SCR 1441 and to determine the next steps that needed to be taken. Ironically, this position was also confirmed by the US ambassador to the UN, John D. Negroponte and his counterpart from the UK, Sir Jeremy Greenstock-both envoys implied that the Security Council needed to reconvene if any breach by Iraq arose from non-compliance with the UN inspectors' requirements (Lowe, 2003).
Chinese President then Hu Jintao argued that the UNSC had not sanctioned the use of force against Iraq and as such, his government urged the US to seek a political solution to the impasse within the framework of the UN. Hu disagreed with assertions that SCR 1441 contained legal authority to use armed force (BBC News, 23 January 2003).
The French Foreign Minister then, Dominique de Villepin, stated on 20 January 2003 and on 14 February 2003 that there was no justification for the war because the UN weapon inspectors had not completed their work. In what seemed to be a desperate roll of the dice, the US and the UK attempted to work on a possible second UN draft resolution (to follow SCR 1441) in the hope of quelling this French resistance. However, the US and UK manoeuvres on a proposed second UN resolution seemed to have hit the buffers when Dominique de Villepin, a fierce anti-war critic, travelled to Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon on 9 March 2003, to try and persuade these 3 nonpermanent UNSC members not to support a second UN resolution. This Africa trip further strained the relations between France and the US (Coughlin, 2006).
Earlier, the German Foreign Minister then, Joschka Fischer had told an international security conference in Munich on 10 February 2003, which was also attended by the US Défense Secretary Rumsfeld that America's intention to invade Iraq had failed to garner international support because the reasons advanced for the war were not compelling (Connolly, 2003). This anti-war grandstanding by Germany and France gained widespread public appeal. So, in addition to the disagreements within the UNSC, public opinion against the war was fast gaining traction. This was demonstrated by worldwide protests in major European cities such as Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and Rome, with London recording the biggest anti-war rally in the British history on 15 February 2003, with an estimated 750, 000 protestors (McGoldrick, 2004).
The war critics also argued that the Blix Report of the UNMOVIC of 17 January 2003, while acknowledging that the Iraqi co-operation had been less than satisfactory, nevertheless, had thus far found no smoking gun on the WMD. This was despite having conducted over 700 suspected sites including those spotted by the CIA (Blix, 2004). As a result of this development, Blix requested the Security Council to give the inspectors more time, which meant that at that stage, the required threshold of waging a war had not been met. Therefore, the refusal by the US and the UK to give the inspectors more time reinforced the view that the invasion agenda had long been premeditated (Short, 2005).
The Russian Foreign Minister at the time, Igor Ivanov echoed similar sentiments with that of Blix that the UN inspectors needed more time because they had already made some progress in their work. Ivanov's superior, President Vladmir Putin, also argued strongly in support of this position that the invasion would not be lawful under international law because at that stage, the main criterion in assessing the situation in Iraq needed to be based on the UN inspectors' reports (BBC News, 23 January 2003).
The Bush administration never really believed in the work of the UN inspectors-the US doubted if UNMOVIC chairman Blix would provide them with the results that they wanted to see. In the eyes of the Bush administration, Blix was perceived to be preoccupied with measures that would avoid the war rather than concentrate on finding the supposedly proverbial hidden WMD. The UK ambassador to the UN Sir Jeremy Greenstock-in his analysis-argued that the US pressure that was being exerted on Blix was unhealthy and had the potential of being counterproductive: Greenstock's fears were that Blix would-as a result of undue pressure-become more inclined to be flexible with the Iraqi authorities in a bid to show that he was an expert and professional who would not take inclement instructions from the Americans (Coughlin, 2006). So, apart from having misgivings on Blix, the overall US assessment of events was that unilateral military action was necessary after it became clear in early March of 2003 that a second UN resolution (to follow SCR 1441) would not be possible given the threats of a veto by then French President Jacques Chirac and then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder (Rumsfeld, 2011).

Arguments on the use of force under Self-defence
The US and its allies contended that the attacks of the magnitude of 9/11 constituted an armed attack, and any retaliation would be justified under international law, arguing that Article 51 of the UN Charter had a broader interpretation of an "armed attack" (UN Charter, United Nations, 1945). The Americans further contended that it was legitimate to attack Iraq because the regime had failed to prove to the UN for the past 12 years (from 1990 to 2002) that it was not developing WMD (Malone, 2006).
On 5 February 2003, US Secretary of State then, Collin Powell, told the UNSC meeting that Iraq's continued violations of the UN resolutions could no longer be condoned. Powell brandished wild and otherwise unsubstantiated claims that Iraq was fast developing the WMD that could end up in hands of terrorists. The US also accused Iraq of being hostile to its neighbours and threatening them with the use of force. Further, Iraq was accused of involving itself in covert operations such as the attempt to assassinate former US President George H. Bush (President Bush senior) in 1993 while on a trip to the Middle East. The US was of the view that the Iraq manoeuvres warranted the application of strategic preventative mechanisms to wade off the threats posed (Rumsfeld, 2011).
However, the war opponents led by France argued that the intelligence reports had found no evidence of any links between Iraq and al-Qaeda and therefore, the claims by the US that Iraq would give WMD to al-Qaeda terrorists did not seem feasible. At any rate, Iraq could not have provided al-Qaeda with the WMD which in the first instance, it did not possess, as the UN inspectors thus far, had found no evidence of the availability of the WMD (Cook, 2003). In addition, the military capability of Iraq in 2003 and the threat it posed to the international community was much lower than, for instance, North Korea and Iran, so, targeting Iraq appeared to be based on sheer cherry-picking and could not therefore, be justified under selfdefence (Short, 2005). Furthermore, the report by the IAEA of 1997 under the then Director-General Hans Blix (now UNMOVIC chairman) and the subsequent IAEA report of 1998 under the new Director-General, Mohammed Al Baradei had indicated that Iraq possessed no capability of producing WMD. Although some issues had remained unresolved, it was sufficiently clear, from the point of view of the IAEA, that Iraq had been disarmed (Blix, 2004b).
More damagingly, Richard Clarke, who served in the Bush administration as counter-terrorism coordinator and later worked as special advisor to President Bush on cyberterrorism informed the administration that the claims of Iraq having ties with al Qaeda were unfounded. A primary expert within their ranks informed them, but they chose to ignore his advice. Therefore, the US could not plausibly claim self-defence against Iraq. Put simply, Clarke's expert advice, coupled with the fact that there was no ongoing or imminent threat from Iraq at the material time makes the US claims of self-defence-at best, dubious, and at worst, as mere concoctions (Walcott, 2016).

Arguments on the use of force under Humanitarian Intervention
In January 2002, President Bush accused the Iraqi regime of committing heinous crimes against the Kurds in Northern Iraq, a situation that had earlier in 1991 prompted the US and the UK forces to intervene. In March 1988, Saddam Hussein's regime unleashed chemical gas attacks in the Iraqi city of Halabja which claimed an estimated 5000 Kurdish lives. In the eyes of the Americans, this brazen act showed that Iraq could use chemical weapons anywhere else. President Bush claimed that those crimes against the Kurds were still being perpetrated by Saddam Hussein (Robert, 2003).
A report carried out in Iraq by the British officials and Human rights organisations in the autumn of 2002 revealed gross violations of human rights by the Iraqi regime against its civilian population. This report provided additional ammunition to the US to justify calls for humanitarian intervention (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2002).

According to the humanitarian situation analysis of Richard McCutcheon, a Canadian Research
Associate who claimed to have lived in Iraqi in the early 1990s, the 1991 Gulf War had not really ended, as evidenced by the daily suffering of the ordinary Iraqis. So, the 2003 war was something that had been brewing since 1991. The awareness of the magnitude of the challenges that ordinary Iraqis were facing may have been blurred due to weak media coverage which failed to reflect the actual picture of events on the ground (McCutcheon, 2006).
To elaborate further on the Iraq humanitarian situation at the material time, McCutcheon (2006) posited that: . . . while living in Iraq, I saw and experienced evidence of a country under severe duress. The continuing economic, social, and physical devastation of the country -the raid sirens and the sound of bombs exploding that I heard in the north and south of Iraq -all spoke to a violence that smacked of war. I was disturbed by the disjuncture between my own observations, experiences and perceptions gained by years of critically reading reports generated by observers and researchers on the ground and the mainstream understanding of the 'Gulf war' as a past event.
Other than the humanitarian reasons, the Bush administration also believed that there was need to get rid of the Iraq dictatorial regime as a way of spreading democracy. This democracy promotion mantra was politically designed to portray the US as champions of human rights values, justice, and good governance practices in what the former Bush administration's National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice referred to as "transformational diplomacy". The US envisioned that regime change in Iraq would provide a footstall to penetrate the Middle East and influence democratic reforms (Mahajan, 2003). In his speech to the House of Commons on 25 February 2003, Prime Minister Blair stated that there was need to act against rogue regimes that torture and execute their own people (McGoldrick, 2004).
Analysts such as Michael I. Niman, a professor of journalism asserts that on the humanitarian front, the Bush administration was compromised of recycled Reagan and Bush Sr. officials in granting foreign aid and military support through the worst of Saddam's atrocities against the Kurds (in Northern Iraq), and Iran. In 2002, a UN report on Iraq-strangely-had several of its pages removed illegally by US officials. The missing pages in that UN report, according to Niman (2003) were removed because they contained incriminating information on US: the information on the missing pages implicated US officials in the successive Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations in connection with the unlawful supply of Saddam Hussein, from 1983, with innumerable weapons of mass destruction such as anthrax and botulism toxin. These illegal shipments continued to flow to Iraq up to the late 1980s. Saddam in 1988 used chemical weapons against the Kurds. With this information in mind, it is not hard to figure out where the chemicals that killed the Kurds came from. So, this illegal trade in weapons explains why the pages in that UN report of 2002 were missing.
More damagingly, the information on the missing pages suggest that the evidence contained on those pages could possibly have paved way for a case of war crimes against US officials responsible for those shipments-officials such as Donald Rumsfeld, particularly for his role as a liaison for the US military aid during the Iraq-Iran war (Niman, 2003). This basic historical fact put the Bush administration in a difficult position years later to claim that Saddam (whom they previously supported through the illegal supply of weapons) needed to be removed (for crimes they supported) based on alleged humanitarian concerns. It strains credulity to suggest that you are concerned with human rights violations when the very people you are accusing were the ones whom you supported with unlawfully obtained weapons.
A controversial theory which may have permeated the US agenda for regime change came from the former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband who, after the coalition had struggled to justify the reasons for the war now apparently argued-seemingly grasping at straws-that democracy must be considered as a human right. According to Miliband's "democracy theory", military interventions for purposes of supporting movements to spread democracy in states which are ruled by dictators were justified. For instance, Saddam Hussein's regime had used harmful chemicals and gassed its own civilian population in the town of Halabja in 1988; such acts-Miliband noted-underscored the need for the universal value of democracy to be recognised and achieved by all possible means (Wintour, 2008).
However, the Iraq war critics led by France and Germany disputed the rationale of the supposed Iraq humanitarian intervention arguing that the Iraq situation did not provide a strong case for humanitarian intervention (Connolly, 2003).

Assessment of the arguments on the use of force under UNSC authorisation
Article 24 and Article 42 of the UN Charter states that, in a bid to remove a threat to international peace and security, the UNSC itself may authorise the use of force (Shaw, 2003). Further, Article 25 of the UN Charter emphasises co-operation and compliance with the decisions of the UNSC by all UN member states. Furthermore, Article 39 and Article 41 of the UN Charter expressly gives the UNSC full mandate under these circumstances, to act as it deems appropriate (UN Charter, United Nations, 1945).
However, in the case of Iraq, the UN, through the various SCRs from 1990 to 2002, was continually engaging with the Iraqi authorities and making periodic assessments to determine the necessity and proportionality of the punishments to be melted (United Nations, 2004). Thus, under the category of UNSC authorisation, it is hard to see evidence of any SCR that expressly and explicitly authorised the use of armed force against Iraq in 2003. For instance, SCR 1441 of 2002 upon which the US relied to invade Iraq did not possess any known authority of "automaticity" to wage the war. The lack of automaticity in SCR 1441 was confirmed by the US's own ambassador to the UN, John D. Negroponte, and his UK counterpart Sir Jeremy Greenstock (Lowe, 2003). Also, the claim by the Bush administration and the UK Attorney General of "continuing authority" of SCR 678 and SCR 687 in SCR 1441, or otherwise the "revival of SCR 678" of 1990 was illconceived because the reason for which the UNSC authorised the use of force in SCR 678 had already been achieved in 1991, when Kuwait was liberated. Furthermore, other than the US, there is no other state that supported the view that the Iraqi breaches could have been dealt with by individual states instead of the UN (The Iraq Inquiry, 2009).
Thus, the only possible legal justification for the war would have been the supposed "revival" of SCR 678 of 1990 as claimed by the US-but so far, there is no precedence in the "revival of authorisation" in the UNSC resolutions which would support such a claim. Further, the "revival argument" is not supported by most legal practitioners. At any rate, the revival process itself required the review by the UNSC. Effectively, this means that either way, the Security Council needed to reconvene to decide the next course of action (Robert, 2003). More damningly is the fact that there were disagreements within the UNSC on the authority contained in SCR 1441. These disagreements alone show that there was no consensus and hence, logically, the absence of consensus implies that there was no authorisation of the use of force from the UNSC as a collective body. In addition, key UN personnel such as then Secretary General Kofi Annan and the UN weapons inspections chief Hans Blix also disputed the legal status of the Iraq invasion. In September 2004, Annan explicitly stated that the war was waged outside the confines of international law (Malone, 2006).
Ironically, no state would like to be viewed as an abrogator of international law, and this became evident in January and February of 2003 when the US made frantic efforts to have a second UN resolution to provide sufficient back up before the invasion in March 2003. That idea alone-of attempting to seek a second UN resolution-confirmed that SCR 1441 on its own was not a sufficient basis upon which to wage the war. It is also argued that the "serious consequences" mentioned in SCR 1441 were issues to be determined by the UNSC as the offended party and not by the US government (Dominice, 2003).
Legal analysts such as Robert (2003) opine that the majority of the UNSC members would most certainly have not supported the proposed second UN resolution because the draft would have turned out to be a "resolution gone too far" as it would have determined that Iraq was in breach of SCR 1441 and would therefore, have authorised the use of armed force.
Deducing from the analyses above, the US and its coalition partners failed to meet the threshold required on the use of force under the UNSC authorisation.

Assessment of the arguments on the use of force under self-defence
Article 51 of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) allows for the "inherent right of individual or collective self-defence in the event of an armed attack while waiting for (appropriate) measures to be taken by the UNSC". By implication, this does not suggest a definitive use of armed force but instead suggest that force may be applied only as a last resort momentarily, while still expecting guidance from the Security Council (Robert, 2003).
As Robert (2003) has pointed out the challenge that surrounds the interpretation of an armed attack is whether the responses to such attacks should include the right to act pre-emptively against imminent threats. According to Wallace and Martin-Oterga (2009), a case of self-defence can only be warranted if it meets the following criteria: (a) The threat must be pressing or urgent.
(b) The threat must be demonstrated to be overwhelming.
(c) The threat must be one that offers no other options.
In the case of the US, a bone of contention arose from the attacks of 11 September 2001, which were carried out by a terrorist group, al-Qaeda. This group, however, had no known permanent state of residence and had no proven connections with Saddam Hussein. Given that Iraq had no known links with the events of 9/11, the US attack of Iraq cannot, under these circumstances, be argued to fall under the category of self-defence (Zizek, 2004). Further, the Niger uranium intelligence report claims which had formed much of the US evidence against Iraq's alleged WMD were discovered not to have been authentic, yet the Bush administration still seemed intent to rely on those forged reports. This insistence by the Bush administration perplexed the UNMOVIC Chairman Blix who wondered why the US remained adamant by insisting to present-as evidence-information which was not authentic (Mahajan, 2003). Falk (2003) argues that although mega-terrorism itself may have provided a reasonable case for an extended right of self-defence, the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) remains the only arena for recourse to conflicts, and hence, the interests of different states are best served when all UN member states adhere to the guidelines provided for under the UN Charter.
Although the contents of Article 51 of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) may seem not to have been clearly spelt out, the major aspects to be taken into consideration in circumstances such as this, are "necessity and proportionality" (Byers, 2002).
As Byers (2002) has observed, clarity on self-defence has been a controversial subject due to the kind of responses that have been used in international conflicts in the name of self-defence. Two examples will illustrate this dilemma: (1) in 1985, the headquarters of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in Tunisia was attacked by Israeli forces and left at least 60 people dead-this was in retaliation for 3 Israeli civilians that were killed by PLO militants near Cyprus, (2) in May 2010-concerning the Flotilla incident-where a ship carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza was attacked by Israeli forces and resulted in the death of 19 activists and left several others injured (Both, 2011).
The Israelis argued that the grounds of the attack were justified because the Flotilla (ship) had violated the Israeli conditions of a naval blockade. The two examples lay bare the complexities and limitations of self-defence actions. As the examples have shown, the self-defence notion is often abused, and usually done with excessive force that is disproportionate to the threat posed (Carmola, 2005).
In July 2002, a secret UK document on Iraq famously known as the "Downing Street Memo" by the Blair government was leaked by the media. The document was a bombshell: it revealed that the authorities in the US and the UK had put the intelligence services under pressure so that they could frame their reports in line with the policy of regime change in Iraq. This exposé weakened the justification claims of "self-defence" on the part of the US (Short, 2005).
More evidence was unearthed from the UK Hutton Inquiry of August 2003 which was established to investigate the mysterious death in July 2003 of a British biological expert Dr David Kelly. In his report before his demise, Dr Kelly had revealed that the threat posed by Iraq had been inflated by the UK intelligence towards the run-up to the Iraq war. This further weakens the claims of self-defence. Critics also argue that the use of the "shock and awe" attack strategy, the indiscriminate use of armed force, by the US forces in Baghdad reinforces the argument that the Bush administration had little regard for international law .
The shock and awe strategy incapacitated key installations in a wholesale manner without due regard to the welfare of the civilian population. The military force that was applied was woefully disproportionate to the threat posed by Iraq, and could, therefore, not be justified as acts of selfdefence (Carmola, 2005). Furthermore, these acts also contravened the laws of war as stipulated in The Geneva Conventions of 1949 on the laws of war (Ramesh, 2003).
According to Chomsky (2003) the Iraq war was simply about expanding the US hegemony rather than as an attempt to rid Saddam Hussein of the alleged WMD because potential security threats are everywhere, not just in Iraq. A further comparison can be drawn between the Iraq case and the Afghanistan intervention: unlike in Iraq, the evidence of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan coupled with the fact that the Taliban regime's diplomatic standing in IR was very low, made it compelling for the UN to believe that the military strikes in Afghanistan seemed justifiable.
Article 51 of the UN Charter was conveniently used as a scapegoat by the US to pick and choose a regime that they did not like to achieve its hegemonic ambitions. This makes a mockery of the US policy on democratic governance whereby, on the one hand, it condemned Saddam Hussein but, on the other hand, continued to condone other equally repressive regimes of the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Qatar. This double standard has created much hate for the US in the region and beyond (Sherry, 2005). Since the self-defence notion had failed to provide convincing reasons for the Iraq war, the invasion went ahead after exploiting the atmosphere of the war on terror, a psychological ploy aimed at imposing democracy through the "back door" (Kampfner, 2009).
In addition, the Human Rights Watch produced a jaw-dropping report on the US abrogation of international law: the report revealed that the US administration had been secretly collaborating with the Gaddafi regime in Libya (a rogue state) on the war on terror through the CIA and the British intelligence, the MI6, in the renditions of terror suspects. This exposé confirmed that although the US -on face value -portrays itself as a global leader in democracy and human rights, it showed that it had very little respect for international law and was mainly concerned about its own national interests (Human Rights Watch, 2004).
It is dumbfounding that the US could undertake extraditions of suspects to a state such as Libya -a notorious state that was known for torture and other heinous human rights violations. This exposé considerably lowered the US moral leadership which it has assumed on good governance issues; for you cannot preach water and drink wine (BBC News, 5 September 2011).
The Boha Mousa Public Inquiry report of 2011 by the British government which was investigating the death of an Iraqi detainee (Boha Mousa) and other detainees by British forces in Basra, Iraq in 2003 unearthed appalling human rights abuses in its final report of 8 September 2011: that in the aftermath of the war, the Iraqi detainees were subjected to unlawful techniques such as hooding, deprivation of food and severe beatings. From these revelations, it is hard to see how the coalition forces could justify these acts as self-defence mechanisms (Wyatt, 2011).
Overall, the US abuse of alleged terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay such as through indefinite detentions and solitary confinement and the gross mistreatment of Iraqi soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison cast a dark shadow on the US's commitment to the rules of justice under international law (Kampfner, 2009).
The renditions saga and the systematic maltreatment of detainees strengthens the argument by Chomsky (2003) that the war was illegal because if it was properly authorised by the UNSC, the lines of responsibility and accountability would have been clearly spelt out to avoid arbitrary use of power by the coalition troops. Also, the refusal by the US and UK to be answerable to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on alleged atrocities committed by their troops shows how little regard they have for international law. The ICC has repeatedly been denounced by the US top brass officials as a kangaroo Court.
Furthermore, deducing from the analyses of Feith (2009) andWyatt (2011), the hurried and otherwise sham trial of Saddam Hussein shows more ominous machinations of regime change at play. For instance, some of Saddam's trial judges failed to recuse themselves from the case despite having conflict of interest. Also, the subsequent execution of Saddam being filmed by social media only worked to confirm two things: (1) that US and its allies had no regard whatsoever for the rules of international law that govern The Geneva Conventions (1949), and the UN (United Nations (CAT), 1984) Convention Against Torture, (2) these breaches of international human rights norms also seemed to confirm that the invasion of Iraq was, in all probability, aimed at regime change, and not the purported reason of ridding Iraq of WMD. Glennon (2006) opines, however, that states assess their security threats in different ways and what might seem imminent to one state might not be projected as such by other states. This is the dilemma in Article 51 of the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) which only recognises armed attacks to warrant self-defence responses. Article 51 of the UN Charter remains silent on the responses to an imminent attack regardless of the seriousness of such a threat. The other grey area to consider is, at what stage if ever, can individual states be allowed to use armed force when the UNSC is unwilling to do so due to red tape as was seemingly the case with Iraq.
According to Glennon (2006), the events of the 2003 Iraq war are not entirely a surprise given the supremacy of the US-this pre-eminence will continue to allow the US to act arbitrarily as they have done in the past. Franck (2003) supports the view that the US has the right to protect its interests by using armed force to avert imminent threats because what constitutes an imminent threat in the 21 st century cannot be limited to what constituted an imminent threat in 1945 when the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) was drafted. Franck (2003) adds that even if the invasion did not conform to international law requirements, the action has the potential to influence the reform of the law so that it reflects the current realities. Also, unilateral action might be a positive development which could provide for a new doctrine of preventative use of force to meet today's security challenges.
Based on the analyses above, it is deduced that US and its coalition partners failed to meet the threshold required on the use of force under the UN self-defence notion.

Assessment of the arguments on the use of force under Humanitarian intervention
Scholars such as Weiss (2007) opine that the concept of humanitarian intervention is both legitimate and legal and exists in customary international law where the most crucial aspect of its utility lies on its parameters. Humanitarian intervention remains a controversial concept mainly in the following ways: (1) it needs a subjectively determined 'high threshold of 'suffering among the population to justify intervention, (2) the act of intervention itself may violate the principle of state sovereignty-a contravention of one of the earliest forms of customary international law which has been recognised since the Westphalian times (Buchanan, 2003).
Proponents of the war argued that Iraq had been under UN sanctions since 1991 that this situation had created a humanitarian crisis for the population that had been subjected to considerable suffering. To alleviate the suffering, the UN, in 1996, authorised a humanitarian initiative for Iraq, the Oil-for-Food program (Council on Foreign Relations, 2005).
Under this program, Iraq was given broad leeway to determine where to sell its oil to enable it purchase food, medical supplies, and other necessities for the population. The UN was mandated to monitor those oil sales. However, the program was soon marred by UN mismanagement. Saddam exploited these mismanagement loopholes which led to the Iraqi regime earning revenues from corruption in form of kickbacks, complacency, manipulation of oil invoices, illegal surcharges, awarding oil contracts to cronies, and oil smuggling. The UN commission of enquiry that was tasked to investigate these scandals in 2004 found that Saddam had earned well over 1.5 billion USD from those fraudulent oil sales. The commission report also hinted that the program had been subjected to political manipulation by the Iraqi regime whereby the illicit incomes were now utilized to subvert the UN sanctions (Council on Foreign Relations, 2005).
The fact that Saddam abused the oil-for-food program entailed that the ordinary citizens who were supposed to be the primary beneficiaries were not sufficiently benefitting from this program. This, therefore, means that the humanitarian situation in the country remained largely unresolved. Furthermore, the abuse of the program itself was a violation of the UNSC resolution that established it (United Nations, 2004).
From the anti-war campaigners however, humanitarian intervention under the circumstances discussed above would still be a weak reason to use because the weapons inspectors were already working on the ground under an enhanced UN inspections regime (UNMOVIC). The presence of the UN inspectors meant that the Iraq regime's capacity to cause "widespread strife" to its population had been significantly averted. Also, unlike in 1991 when the US and the UK intervened in Iraq to protect the Iraq Kurdish population on the strength of SCR 688 of 1991, the case this time around did not have any such resolution to back up the calls for humanitarian intervention (Franck, 2003).
Human Rights Watch (2004) points out that humanitarian intervention that occurs without the consent of the relevant government can be justified only in the face of ongoing or imminent flagrant human rights violations. This does not seem to have been the case with Iraq at the material time. Furthermore, the invasion of a sovereign state on humanitarian basis without the UNSC authorisation damages the international legal instruction which itself is crucial to protect human rights. Falk (2003) analyses a comparison in the degree of urgency of the crises between the Iraq and the Kosovo cases: whereas in the Kosovo crisis the moral and political case was compelling as evidenced by the unity and co-operation among NATO members, the Iraq case failed to provide a similar spirit of co-operation because both NATO and the UNSC were divided on the matter. In the Iraqi case, all the traditional allies of the US in NATO, in the EU and in the UNSC were not persuaded by the reasons advanced for the war (Falk, 2003).
It can be argued that an example of a state such as DR Congo had a much more compelling case for humanitarian intervention than Iraq: due to a weak government in the DR Congo, many of its citizens had been brutally killed and displaced by armed militias and dozens of women were being raped indiscriminately yet the government of the DR Congo had only received lukewarm humanitarian intervention responses from the international community (Cook, 2004).
During the UNSC disagreements on Iraq, the Blair government was rocked by a spate of protest resignations, otherwise internal rebellions by government officials who argued that the case for the war was weak, and therefore, lacked moral and legal support. On 17 March 2003 (a few days before the commencement of the war), Robin Cook-a top government official-who had previously served as Foreign Secretary, now leader of the House of Commons stepped down. Cook (2003) protested that: . . . I have resigned from the cabinet because I believe that a fundamental principle of Labour party's foreign policy has been violated. If we believe in an international community based on binding rules and institutions, we cannot simply set them aside when they produce results that are inconvenient to us. I cannot defend a war with neither international agreement nor domestic support. I applaud the determined efforts of the prime minister and the foreign secretary to secure a second UN resolution on Iraq. Now that those attempts have ended in failure, we cannot pretend that getting a second UN resolution was of no importance.
Deducing from Cook's argument, the reasons advanced for the war by the US and the UK including the humanitarian excuses were empty. Cook's resignation was swiftly followed by Home Office Minister John Denham and Health Minister Lord Philip Hunt, both of whom affirmed that they could not support a war that lacked the backing of the UNSC. Soon afterwards, the deputy legal advisor at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Elizabeth Wilmshurst, also resigned. In May 2003, Clare Short, the Secretary for International Development, an office that coordinated overseas humanitarian crises and reconstruction in British outposts also stepped down. In her indictment, Secretary Short accused Prime Minister Blair of unilateralism and not being open enough on the Iraq question. These mass resignations considerably weakened the UK's case for the war (Short, 2005).
Based on the analyses above, it is determined that the US and its coalition partners failed to meet the threshold required on the use of force under the UN humanitarian intervention notion.

Recommendations on future solutions to reduce warfare
Some analysts have argued that the reform of the UN system, for instance, through an expanded UN Security Council could reduce occurrences of wars. In theory, this suggestion might appear to have traction, but the political analysis of the ontology of the workings of the Security Council make grim reading for those expansion plans to succeed. First, the great power politics, i.e., the politics of self-preservation, the politics of desiring to maintain the status quo is likely to persist. The second reason why a reform agenda within the UN system would remain futile for a foreseeable future is the idea of the existence of the veto power. So far, the use of the veto seems to have caused more problems than created solutions. For instance, at the height of the Iraq fiasco in 2003, France threatened to veto any Security Council resolution that would have recommended the use of force against Iraq. As a result of that threat, it can be argued that the US realised that the only way they could tame Iraq was to wage war outside the UN Charter rules.
The third reason why reform is problematic is that the incorporation of more members into the Security Council would most certainly make consensus a tall order to achieve.
The current Russian war against Ukraine provides a stark reminder that great powers will continue to overlook the UN Charter rules on warfare. While the European and US lawyers are currently documenting alleged war crimes in Ukraine, chances that Russia will be called to account before an international Court is a pipedream.
Ordinarily, war crimes are tried by the ICC, yet the efficacy and standing of the ICC has been severely debilitated by the US and UK who have blatantly refused to be answerable to its jurisdiction. The US has openly ridiculed the ICC and labelled it as a corrupt, ineffective kangaroo court. So, for the US and UK to now turn around and expect Russia to be answerable to the very judicial institutions that they themselves have assailed, seems to be a case of chickens coming home to roost. The question that begs a just answer is: why should Russia be tried by a kangaroo court? What sort of justice will Russia get from a Court with such low standing? Why is the ICC a bad Court for the US and the UK, but only a good Court for subaltern countries? This political cherry picking and flip flopping on international rules shows that the ontology of marauding superpowers spins on hegemonial expansion at the expense of weaker states. Other than the ICC, the alternative legal route for the US and European lawyers who may still be determined to press the alleged war crime charges against Russia may lie in pushing for the creation of a special international tribunal. However, this path is also doomed -it is a blueprint dead on arrival -because the creation and legitimacy of any such tribunal requires the endorsement of the UN Security Council of which Russia is a member.
Jeffrey Sachs, a professor of economics and public policy at Harvard weighed in on the current crisis in Ukraine vis-à-vis Western foreign policies when he argued that: . . . when (President) Putin came into power, he was not anti-European, not anti-American. What he saw (later) was the incredible arrogance of the US, the expansion of NATO, the wars in Iraq, the covert war in Syria, the war in Libya against the UN resolution. So, the US created so much of what it is facing now through its own ineptitude and arrogance. There was no linear determination; it was step by step US arrogance that has brought the situation to where it is today (Independent Global News, 30 August 2022).
This author is of the view that instead of relying on the UN, the solution to reduce occurrences of wars might lie in strengthening regional bodies that should ordinarily (and geographically) be the primary care takers of regional problems; bodies such as the ECOWAS (in West Africa) and SADC (in Southern Africa). The strength of regional integration can best be illustrated by events in the early 2000 where the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had conspiracies of regime change against Zimbabwe's then President Robert Mugabe. Thabo Mbeki, who was the president of South Africa at the material time, and a legendary SADC personality and pan-Africanist, refused to be coerced into Blair's regime change schemes. By refusing to cooperate, Mbeki delegitimised any potential subsequent attempts by the West to interfere in the sovereign internal affairs of Zimbabwe. Another example that illustrates the strength of regional bodies is on Gambia: the then dictator of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh lost the presidential polls in 2017 but refused to step down. The ECOWAS organisation did not wait for the UN but rather mobilised themselves (through a regional military force) and compelled the tyrant of Gambia, Yahya Jammeh to stepdown. Therefore, the Arab League can take a leaf from these two practical examples and rise to the occasion to prevail over its regional matters of the Middle East. The seeming disunity and lack of a common agenda within the Arab League has weakened its appeal to champion the cause of its members.
This apparent wishy-washy disposition and complacency by the Arab league may have contributed to the occurrence of the Iraq war because ordinarily, the case of Iraq could have been diffused within the region as the two African cases have shown. A strong regional body could potentially have deterred the US machinations to prevail in Iraq.
Today, one rarely hears about the Arab League-the organisation seems to have hibernated. It is not far-fetched to suggest that in its current form, the Arab League-if it exists nowadays at all-has reduced itself to a gentleman's club, a club of persons that seem to have no interest of serving anything beyond themselves and their individual states. Waiting for the UN seems to be an effort in futility as the case of Iraq in 2003 and now the case of Ukraine has shown.

Conclusion
On all the three key thresholds that were set out to gauge the legality or illegality of the Iraq war of 2003, i.e., (1) the use of armed force under UNSC authorisation, (2) the use of armed force under self-defence, and (3) the use of armed force under humanitarian intervention, the US failed to meet the required benchmarks to wage the war. Most of the US's arguments contravened the UN Charter (United Nations, 1945) rules on the use of armed force and were also at variance with international customary laws on the established rules of state practice.
More bizarrely was the idea by the UK government to ask its Attorney General to consult with the US officials on the legal status of SCR1441-seeking legal advice from a state such as the US which had shown so little respect for international law seemed the most inexplicable thing to do and which points to assertions by critics that the war was premeditated.
Further, a litany of blatant human rights violations by the US in the aftermath of the war involving the maltreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in the name of "war on terror", the abuse of Iraqi war prisoners at Abu Gharib and the Libya renditions episode-all bring into question, the US's commitment to the promotion of the international human rights jurisprudence.
More damningly, these gross human rights violations were at variance with the US and UK's own proclaimed values of respect for human dignity. You cannot be half pregnant-you cannot call other states to virtues to respecting human rights which you do not yourself try to respect and practice.
On the trigger of the war, it can be argued that the main reason for the invasion was not necessarily the 9/11 events but due mainly to Iraq's failure to comply fully with the UNSC resolutions for a prolonged period from 1990 to 2003. However, it can also be argued that the US trauma of 9/11 provided a psychological reason to trigger the war against a suspected chemical weapons regime that could potentially offer WMD to terrorists. In the main, the Bush administration exploited Iraq's weak cooperation on its disarmament programs with the UN inspectors particularly under the terms of SCR1441.
This weakness by Iraq aided the US to hype and stoke the fears to their constituency that Saddam was concealing WMD. It is argued that Iraq may have been reluctant to declare that it had no WMD for fear that this could have exposed its diminished military prowess in the region. Due to the long-standing rivalry between Iraq and Iran, analysts opine that Iraq's aim was to continue portraying an image that it was still a regional military powerhouse-fearing that the UN inspectors' ultimate report would have revealed that Iraq was in fact a "military basket case". This supposed bravado act, otherwise a huge political miscalculation, dealt a fatal blow to Saddam Hussein's regime as the US army rolled into Baghdad with a presumption that the regime may have been concealing WMD.
It can also be argued that the US was not willing to give the UN inspectors more time as requested by UNMOVIC for fear that "more time" would have proved "tragic" for them as the inspectors would have ultimately concluded in their report that they had found no evidence whatsoever of WMD. Such a revelation could have effectively poured cold water on the US's key argument for the war and could therefore, have rendered the invasion ploys futile.
Although the UNSC is endowed with immense power to make decisions on behalf of other UN member states; its major shortcoming is that it does not operate like a state judicial body, or as a law enforcement agency, and as such, it only relies on its members' goodwill to comply with its directives. As a result of the status quo, i.e., the absence of an active and broad-based UN reform agenda coupled with the absence of strong regional bodies, powerful states might continue to use their preponderance to ignore the UN Charter rules to achieve their Machiavellian ends.