Suez was the last such folly

With the Attorney General's legal advice of 7 March 2003 on the Iraq adventure now public, yet another piece of the jigsaw falls into place. Tony Blair has said history will judge his actions; but we will not need to wait for the years to pass. Kosovo, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan had made Tony Blair the warrior Prime Minister.

He would use British forces to set the world to rights, and wait for the international acclaim that followed. David Manning (now our man in Washington) reported back to Mr Blair on his meeting with Condoleezza Rice to discuss Iraq in March 2002 that: "I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and public opinion that was very different from anything in the States".

For the next year Mr Blair worked not only at managing the domestic obstacles to war, but also at shaping international opinion.

Regime change has no legal basis as a reason

for war, and Tony Blair knew that. Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction were the chosen rationale for action against Saddam Hussein. The inadequacies of the September 2002, Joint Intelligence Committee dossier were itemised by Lord Butler and his team last year.

The WMD dossier described by Mr Blair as "extensive, detailed and authoritative" has been proved after two years of fruitless searching in Iraq to be just plain wrong.

Yet at the time the Prime Minister's grand strategy seemed to be working. The British military began covert training for a possible operation. The intensity of RAF and USAF attacks in the no-fly zones over Iraq were stepped up. By November 2002, Resolution 1441 was unanimously adopted by the UN Security Council. This called on Iraq to meet its disarmament obligations.

All the council's ambassadors were at pains to say that the resolution carried no authorisation for the use of the military. The need for a further UN resolution to authorise the use of force was becoming acute by early 2003. The

Americans were intending to carry out a full-scale attack before the heat of summer. A half-baked attempt to produce yet another British dossier to shape opinion backfired in February, when it turned out to be an old PhD thesis. Pressure on the Security Council members was increased, but by now UN arms inspector Hans Blix was reporting some progress.

The Foreign Office lawyers were clear that military action would need a specific authorisation by the Security Council. Britain and America worked hard to convince the other members, but without success.

On 11 February 2003, Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General, held discussions with the White House legal adviser, John Bellinger, who is reported to have said: "We had trouble with your attorney, we got him there eventually." However we now know from yesterday's leaked legal advice that the Attorney General had not totally swallowed the US line, and still felt on 7 March that there might be legal problems. As Lord Butler explains in his report, the Attorney General then required the Prime Minister to confirm that "it was possible to demonstrate hard evidence of non-compliance and noncooperation" by Iraq.

With this assurance the Attorney General appeared to feel able to provide his unequivocal short statement on 17 March.

BUT why was the unequivocal legal opinion needed? War means our armed forces being authorised to kill other human beings. Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, Chief of the Defence Staff, was aware of this heavy responsibility. Not only is there a moral dimension, international law puts an onus on senior commanders. He needed a clear statement that the use of force was legal - and as we know that was what he got. Do the new revelations of how the legal opinion was produced give our military a problem now? From a legal point of view, almost certainly not. Sir Michael did what he needed to do by getting the right legal opinion.

It is perhaps more difficult to gauge what long-term effect the revelations will have on the trust between the armed forces and their political masters.

Suez was the last such foreign policy folly, but in that the Prime Minister departed soon afterwards.

While the Falklands conflict resulted from strategic misjudgment, Lord Carrington as Foreign Secretary was quick to fall on his sword. This time, despite a catalogue of poor judgment and policy manipulation, which has led to tens of thousands of deaths, all the key players remain in place. We salute the bravery and loyalty of our armed forces, but their political masters deserve no medals for their conduct in this sorry affair.