If you murder someone, then wander into a police station and give a full confession of what you have done, you have broken the law.  Statutes says what murder is, that you shouldn’t do it and if you do, you are going to prison for life.

There is not a statute about war.  No checklist or procedure exists to decide how to make a war legal (academics will be waving their UN Charters’ around at this point, please stay with me, I am simplifying to prove a point) because there is not an international law statute book that we can check to find out.  International law has more in common with a darts club than criminal law.  The members of the club think of the rules, keep to the rules, interpret what the rules mean and decide what to do if a member breaks the rules.  Problems arise when the members disagree about what the rules mean, but no-one outside the darts club can help them interpret their own rules.   The same group of people who have the standing in law to make a credible declaration that the second Iraq was (il)legal could also be prompted to writing a doctoral thesis about whether international law exists at all.

Then there are lawyers.  Most professions find an answer.  Two competent doctors cannot simultaneously find the same patient to be perfectly healthy and sick.  However, two competent lawyers each make a living by going before a judge and arguing that the claimant is right or wrong, and the judge agrees with one or the other.  In law school, you learn to remove an emotional response to a situation and find a way to argue the law fits your presentation of the facts which is favourable to your client.  The Chilcot Enquiry today heard that a raft of foreign office lawyers came to one opinion, and Jack Straw (the foreign secretary at the time and a barrister before entering politics) came to another.  The media are determined to spin this into some sort of absolute right or wrong answer, but it simply does not exist.  In a year of studying international law I’ve read stacks of opinions and could quite contently make a case for or against the war depending on what you would like to hear, but no judge, lawyer or head of state can say I or Jack Straw is wrong with any certainty.

With hindsight, I doubt Tony Blair, Jack Straw or maybe even President Bush, if they could foresee the ending, would have been so eager for the beginning.  I wonder, in Britain, if Blair and Straw’s  legal training was a factor.  Where anyone else would have heard a team of lawyers say “no” and stopped, did Straw and Blair think “well, that’s one argument, but we have a better one”?  If Saddam Hussein’s palace had been stacked to the gills with long range biological weapons they would have been hailed as brave visionaries overruling the cautious government lawyers to protect their citizens.  As it turns out, it’s the government lawyers that get vindication.  There has also discussion of the idea that the FCO lawyers are specialists and Jack Straw was some over-promoted ambulance chaser.  This is nonsense, as illustrated by the darts club analogy.  Jack Straw and Tony Blair, as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, joined an elite club of international law makers and in that role, like leaders from Churchill back to Caesar, they are empowered to quite literally make international law up as they go along.

UPDATE: I thought I was being novel and thought-provoking by posting the above.  It seems Jack of Kent beat me to it by three hours – at least someone might agree with me.

I went to an average state comprehensive school.  When the teachers really got to the end of their rope there would be group punishment.  I vividly remember being kept late one Friday because a classmate had stolen the keys to my (recently qualified) geography teacher’s car.  This presented quite a problem for her getting home, and so we were all kept back until the culprit confessed or was given up by the class.

As the minutes ticked by, the injustice of the situation really made me angry.  I’d spent the lesson working and so had missed which of the four class clowns was responsible this time.  The tension built and the anger became quite a palpable shared experience.  It wasn’t directed at the culprit but at the teacher for what was seen as a large and unfair abuse of power.  All most of us had done was work diligently for an hour and we were now being punished because we could not rat out the baddie within our ranks.  I suppose the idea was that the culprit would ultimately be overcome by the guilt of inconveniencing his classmates and confess.  It never worked.

This is how I am beginning to feel about air travel.  I loved travelling when I was younger, especially the variety and potential of airports.   I still find something very exciting about the idea that you can go into these huge buildings with some money and a passport and in a matter of hours you can be almost anywhere else in the world.  Travel writers have nominated budget airlines as bearing responsibility for sapping the glamour from air travel, but I disagree.  Ryanair in particular facilitated a lot of my exploration of Europe in my late teens, disappearing over long weekends to Eastern Europe with a tent and a wallet full of dollars.  I was never really fixated on the flight, just the departing and arriving.  I think this greater airborne mobility is a good thing, even if we have lost the free in-flight bar, as it gets us to new places and exploring new cultures.

Airport security after the attempted liquid bombings has tested my patience over the last few years.  I remember a mad dash back though a terminal after I had stupidly wrapped a very well sealed bottle of cognac in a carry-on bag (though many thanks to Spanish security who understood why the plane would go without me before I left it behind).  I hate queuing for things, I hate my stuff being pawed by strangers and since school, I have always hated being made to feel guilty by association or punished because of the actions of others.  Yes, air travel should be safe, but it should also be reasonably convenient, or I will set my travel ambitions closer to home, and businesses will (finally) properly implement the sort of IT systems that makes travel redundant as they cannot afford to have their employees lose half a day to airport security.

Rob’s Blog has another valid perspective, and he is quite right – these scanners were tested and side-lined because public reaction was so negative just a few months ago.  They won’t be any less oppressive three weeks from now.