Nobody, not even British soldiers, should be above the law

Isupported the second Iraq war. It seemed to me in 2003, and still does, that the world has a duty to find ways to remove regimes that commit genocide and use chemical weapons to gas their ethnic minorities.

I would have reversed every opinion I held, however, if David Cameron had been in power and his Ministry of Defence had announced: “British soldiers will be free to torture in Iraq, in breach of the Geneva convention and common law. We will cover up. When we can hide their crimes no longer, we will not pursue justice but, instead, pursue lawyers, who make claims against us, and seek to drive them out of business.” This is now the argument of the Cameron administration, an argument it can deliver from a position of strength. In a battle between the state and lawyers who try to hold it to account, the state has always had the advantage. It can destroy its opponents’ supply lines and starve them into submission.

We are now in a grimly comic country, where in one breath Cameron rightly denounces Vladimir Putin’s contempt for the rule of law. In the next, he proposes to exempt British troops from legal accountability.

He has promised to crack down on an “industry trying to profit from spurious claims” against UK military personnel. His defence secretary. Michael Fallon, says he is so enraged by “ambulance-chasing lawyers” that he wants to stop human rights law covering troops in action.

The impression given by government and most of the press is that the interests of justice must be forgotten because innocent British troops have been the victims of a scam run by greedy lawyers. They prefer to leave the implication that they are the true victims hanging in the air because the evidence against their lachrymose fable is close to overwhelming.

Baha Mousa was killed, not in the heat of battle, but at a British army base in Basra. The army’s own official inquiry found that he had been denied food and water. His swollen and bloodied face bore the evidence of the beatings he had received and the “stress positions”, as the military euphemistically calls them, his guards had locked him in.