LONDON: If US President George W. Bush extends his “war on terror” to strike against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he will not just be walking into a military minefield.

He might be breaking the law.

Bush has fanned expectations that his administration will take its battle to Saddam by naming Iraq in a three-strong “axis of evil” and ratcheting up his rhetoric against Baghdad over its obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections.

But legal experts say that, without a new United Nations Security Council resolution explicitly backing the use of force, the justification for strikes against Baghdad is at best shaky.

The United States and its close ally Britain say Saddam is already violating several UN resolutions, putting him in material breach of the 1991 Gulf War ceasefire reached after his troops had been expelled from Kuwait.

“Legally we would be perfectly entitled to use force as we have done in the past without the support of a United Nations Security Council resolution,” British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said.

In fact it is unclear whether the law is on the side of Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

At issue are two questions — whether the Gulf War ceasefire allows a resumption of conflict if Iraq fails to cooperate, and whether pre-emptive action can be justified to avert a military threat or humanitarian disaster.

UN Security Council resolution 687, adopted shortly after a US-led coalition expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in March 1991, formally brought hostilities to a close. It also demanded Iraq destroy all its weapons of mass destruction.

“The ceasefire is clearly conditional on Iraq doing certain things. If Iraq is in violation of those terms then the ceasefire is called into question,” said Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford University.

The difficulty for Washington lies in the phrasing of the resolution, which appeared to leave responsibility for overseeing that ceasefire with the UN Security Council itself, not individual states.

“There is no provision for enforcement in the resolution which authorises states to carry out military action,” said Durham University’s Professor Colin Warbrick. “It’s for the Security Council to decide what action to take.”

Seeking a mandate for use of force from the council — where veto-wielding members China, Russia and France have all expressed concern at possible military action against Iraq — would be a huge task for Bush.

SELF-DEFENCE?: The justification for military strikes as self-defence — invoked in Afghanistan — or as part of a humanitarian intervention as in NATO’s 1999 Kosovo campaign and Britain’s deployment to Sierra Leone a year later, is also disputed.

“The argument is not to alleviate a humanitarian tragedy in Iraq but to make it comply with the United Nations, or in a broader context...that it is prevented in engaging in terrorism,” said Warbrick.

The self-defence argument was “too remote” because Washington could not convincingly portray Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction as an immediate threat, he added.

The same questions have been raised about sporadic punitive air strikes against Iraq since 1991 and the “no-fly zones” over northern and southern Iraq patrolled by US and British pilots.

The two countries say the zones, set up without a specific UN mandate, were justified on humanitarian grounds to prevent Saddam persecuting Shias in the south and Kurds in the north.

“To maintain this justification over what is now literally a decade, one would need to demonstrate that there are populations in danger of imminent destruction and that this measure is strictly necessary to avert that danger,” said Marc Weller of the Centre of International Studies at Cambridge University.

Washington and London have shown in the past that they are prepared to act alone and without a specific UN backing.

“LAW OF THE JUNGLE”: Britain’s Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was less certain than his cabinet colleague this week that there was a green light for action. Straw, a lawyer like Defence Secretary Hoon, said Washington and London “don’t have a mandate to invade Iraq now”.—Reuters