As is general knowledge, whether the Iraq war was legal or not is a question that is disputed and has been much written about. There has, as yet, been no authoritative determination one way or the other, however, and possibly because of this some interest was aroused when Sir Jeremy Greenstock told the Chilcot inquiry recently that he regarded Britain's participation in military action in Iraq 'as legal but of questionable legitimacy'. I'm interested in the notion of legitimacy intended by him, as it applies to the national, rather than the international, arena. Greenstock elaborated it as meaning that military action 'perhaps' did not have the backing of a majority of people in this country. Others have since echoed him. Shortly after his appearance before the inquiry, a Guardian leader said that 'few would doubt the integrity or weight of the judgment' he had delivered. In yesterday's Times, Ken Macdonald, Director of Public Prosecutions from 2003 to 2008, wrote that Tony Blair had misled and cajoled the British people 'into a deadly war they had made perfectly clear they didn't want'. This is the same view, only stated more categorically.
It's worth noting that, opinion on the Iraq war having been as divided as it was, other critics of British participation emphasize the responsibility of the public at large for not having been decisively enough against the war once it began. Here, for example, is Tim Dunne, professor of international relations at the University of Exeter:
In case all that lets the rest of us off the hook, the mother of all inquiries would ask why public opinion did not swing against Mr Blair once it became clear that the Security Council was not going to authorise "all necessary means" to disarm Iraq. Surely this is one of the lessons that a liberal public must learn. It was our wrong war, too.
Leaving these differing deployments of the state of UK opinion to one side, I think it's worth pondering the idea of legitimacy that Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the Guardian and (implicitly) Ken Macdonald are relying upon. One must assume that their appeal to legitimacy is not meant merely as a restatement of the view that they considered the war to be wrong. It must refer to a level of normativity different from that of legality but going beyond a statement of mere personal judgement. So what is it exactly? For one standard form of democratic legitimacy that would be relevant is parliamentary legitimacy - but this was secured by Blair's government. So what other legitimacy? The weight of public opinion itself, just as such?
I would be interested to learn that Greenstock or the Guardian or Ken Macdonald was committed to the view that key political decisions should be made either by opinion survey or by an expression of the will of the participants in large popular demonstrations; but I cannot, however hard I try, believe this to be the case. They seem such unlikely proponents of the merits of direct democracy in general or of these rather loosely indicative forms of it in particular. So the legitimacy being invoked is an elusive one. And it would probably be forgotten by all three of them when it came to an issue on which a majority of the public was of an opinion they found very unwelcome and parliament's decision, in their eyes, was more sound.