International Crisis Group: Invasion of Iraq has created more problems than it has solved by Fran Kelly ABC News: The World Today 2:17pm 25th Jun, 2004   2 July , 2004    ELEANOR HALL: Former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans says the invasion of Iraq was illegal and that it's created more problems than it solved. In a speech in London, Mr Evans, who's now President of the International Crisis Group, argued that the United State's dominance in world affairs threatens the principle of collective action, the doctrine which underpins the United Nations.    However, the Former Foreign Minister says he supports Saddam Hussein being tried by an Iraqi commission rather than in an international court. ABC Europe Correspondent Fran Kelly spoke to Gareth Evans in London.    GARETH EVANS: Well with the benefit of hindsight now, I think that you can see that UN processes would have delivered a far more sensible result – namely, wait to see what the inspectors turn up, don't plunge into an exercise in military adventurism without being very confident that it's justified.    FRAN KELLY: Though of course when that argument is put to coalition leaders now, they say well that would leave Saddam Hussein in place, and isn't the world a better place for having him locked up. I mean, isn't it?    GARETH EVANS: Of course the world's a better place. But the world would be a better place for having another, roughly at my count, 40 or 50 tyrants locked up, and how many of them are going to be locked up as a result of military crusades of this kind, which have the effect, as we've seen, of creating more problems than they solve.    When behaviour is extreme, as Saddam's was in the '80s - when he was killing his own people with poison gas – then international intervention can be imminently justified. But you can't come along 10 years after the event, take some of these situations off the shelf and claim them ex post, as a rationalisation for action, when all your other first rationalisations, one by one, disappear. It's just not credible. It doesn't help build international consensus.    When really big new problems come along, like perhaps right now in Darfur in western Sudan, another Rwanda, perhaps in the making, it is critical that we behave according to rules, behave according to principles, and I'm afraid the coalition did neither in embarking on that exercise, however desirable it may have been to see the end of Saddam.    FRAN KELLY: And yet, today we've seen Saddam Hussein brought to trial. Under your twin tests of legality and legitimacy, isn't there a case to argue that it was a legitimate use of force to get rid of Saddam Hussein in that way, and bring him to have the force of the law brought upon his head?    GARETH EVANS: You can't have it every which way. I mean, the trouble is, that the argument for pre-emption, because he had weapons of mass destruction, which he was about to deploy, that fell away. The argument that he was supporting terrorists and therefore it was pre-emptively necessary to deal with that aspect of it, that's fallen away. We now have a humanitarian intervention argument, which has some legs, I readily acknowledge, but it's an on balance thing, and on balance I don't think the argument stacks up.    What I don't want is the principle of military intervention to be stripped back to what appears to be cynical ad hoccery when it's critical that it be retained as a bit of weaponry in the international toolbox.    FRAN KELLY: Saddam Hussein will be tried by commission in Iraq. Is that the appropriate legal forum for that to occur?    GARETH EVANS: I've always thought it is important, and appropriate, that Saddam Hussein be tried by the Iraqis, not by the internationals. He is a criminal, not only under international law, but very much under Iraqi law and practice, and I think just to get that out of peoples' systems it should be done that way.    I hate the idea of the application of the death penalty, and if that's a consequence of him going fully into the domestic jurisdiction, that's something to worry about. But the principle of the Iraqis themselves doing it, I think, is admirable.
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