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 invasion would be needed," said an options paper drawn up for him by 
 the Cabinet Office. "Subject to Law Officers' advice, none currently 
 exists." 
  
 The date of the memo was 8 March 2002. Its discussion of the legality 
 of war in Iraq, revealed for the first time today in The Independent 
 on Sunday, sheds new light on the full legal advice of the Attorney 
 General, Lord Goldsmith, which the Government was finally forced to 
 publish amid huge controversy last week. 
  
 A few weeks before the Cabinet Office drew up its paper, President 
 George Bush had unveiled the concept of the "axis of evil" in his 
 State of the Union speech, announcing that after the expulsion of 
 al-Qa'ida from Afghanistan, America had a new score to settle: with 
 Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Mr Blair was due to travel to Texas the 
 following month to meet Mr Bush at his ranch in Crawford, and Britain 
 was struggling to work out its approach to the new American agenda. 
  
 Three years on, the Cabinet Office paper's view of the "options for 
 regime change" look naive, seeing only two possibilities - a Sunni 
 military strongman in the Saddam mould, or a broadly democratic 
 government which would be "Sunni-dominated", while giving the Shias 
 "fair access to government". The present structure, dominated by Shia 
 and Kurdish Iraqis, with Sunnis only patchily represented, was not 
 envisaged. 
  
 When this document was leaked last September, attention rightly 
 focused on its discussion of regime change and the need to step up the 
 pressure on Saddam through tighter sanctions and a military build-up, 
 while working to gather international support and "sensitise" the 
 public through a media campaign. But a previously unseen attachment, 
 written by the Foreign Office's legal advisers, demonstrates that the 
 Prime Minister was warned in detail, more than a year before the war 
 in Iraq, that there was no legal basis for an invasion. 
  
 Not only that: since publication of the 13-page legal opinion 
 delivered by Lord Goldsmith on 7 March 2003, less than a fortnight 
 before war began, it has become clear that he drew directly from the 
 Foreign Office document of a year earlier. Discussing the question of 
 who can decide whether Iraq has violated the 1991 ceasefire terms set 
 out in UN Resolution 687, both say the US is alone in arguing that 
 individual states can make such a decision, rather than the Security 
 Council. 
  
 "We are not aware of any other state which supports this view," says 
 the Foreign Office note, dated 8 March 2002. "I am not aware of any 
 other state which supports this view," says the Attorney General, 364 
 days later. This near unanimity was not to last. 
  
 One of the authors of the Foreign Office document was Elizabeth 
 Wilmshurst, the department's deputy legal adviser. Quitting abruptly 
 on the eve of war, she said in her resignation letter that Lord 
 Goldsmith had "given us to understand" that he shared her team's view 
 of the legal position: resolution 1441, passed by the Security Council 
 in November 2002, did not give authority for an invasion of Iraq; it 
 needed another vote. 
  
 The first inkling Ms Wilmshurst got of any change in the Attorney 
 General's view was in his 7 March paper, which began to argue that 
 resolution 1441 might be enough in itself. But it was far from 
 clear-cut, saying "a reasonable case can be made" that resolution 1441 
 "is capable in principle" of reviving the right to use force without 
 another resolution. But the argument might well not succeed if it came 
 before a court; "the language of resolution 1441 leaves the position 
 unclear". 
  
 This uncertainty had disappeared 10 days later when Lord Goldsmith 
 issued a terse statement saying "it is plain" Iraq was in "material 
 breach" of 1441 and earlier UN resolutions, and that war was 
 justified. This reassured military commanders that their troops would 
 not be prosecuted for war crimes, and convinced wavering Labour 
 backbenchers and the majority of the Cabinet who had not seen his 
 earlier advice that they could vote for war with a clear conscience 
 the next day. 
  
 The same day, Ms Wilms-hurst left the Foreign Office after nearly 30 
 years as a member of its legal team. Not only did she call the war a 
 "crime of aggression", she made plain her view that Lord Goldsmith had 
 buckled under pressure. Having already retreated from his previous 
 legal position, she wrote, his view "has of course changed again into 
 what is now the official line". He had fallen into step with the US. 
  
 The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, argued in the Commons last month 
 that the Attorney General had changed his view because the 
 circumstances changed. He relied upon the claim, always disputed in 
 Paris, that the French had threatened to veto any second UN 
 resolution. But the publication of Lord Goldsmith's detailed advice 
 last week demolished that argument, saying: "There are no grounds for 
 arguing that an 'unreasonable veto' would entitle us to proceed ..." 
  
 The Government has since fallen back on another claim: that Saddam 
 failed the "six tests" proposed by Britain just before the war. But 
 since these required him, among other things, to admit he had 
 concealed weapons of mass destruction and surrender "mobile chemical 
 and biological production facilities" which never existed, the 
 argument is equally specious. 
  
 On one point there has been no equivocation: Lord Goldsmith insisted 
 on 7 March 2003, as the Foreign Office paper had the previous March, 
 that "regime change cannot be the basis of military action". Only a 
 week after hostilities began, the journalist John Kampfner discovered, 
 he was anxious enough about the legal position to issue another legal 
 memo. 
  
 On 26 March 2003 he warned that any military action must be "limited 
 to what is necessary to achieve the objectives" of the 1990 UN 
 resolution, "namely Iraqi disarmament ... The Government has concluded 
 that the removal of the current Iraqi regime from power is necessary 
 to secure disarmament, but the longer the occupation of Iraq 
 continues, and the more the tasks undertaken by an interim 
 administration depart from the main objective, the more difficult it 
 will be to justify the lawfulness of the occupation." Lord Goldsmith's 
 uneasiness is all too evident. 
  
 For Mr Blair to argue that he was not aware of any ambiguity, he would 
 have had to ignore not only the Attorney General's numerous 
 submissions of March 2003, not only the options paper of a year 
 earlier, but most of what was said at a crucial meeting in July 2002. 
 At this, according to Philippe Sands QC in his recent book Lawless 
 World, the Prime Minister, Lord Goldsmith and ministers "considered 
 the legal issues", including the paper prepared by Ms Wilmshurst and 
 colleagues months earlier. 
  
 In eight pages of dry legal language, the document questions whether a 
 UN resolution more than a decade old can still authorise the use of 
 force, saying previous use of it in 1998 "was controversial anyway; 
 many of our partners did not think the legal basis was sufficient ..." 
 Self-defence and humanitarian intervention are given equally short 
 shrift. It is made clear that the legal basis for the "no-fly zones" 
 over Iraq, later used as cover for a bombing campaign to destroy 
 Saddam's air defences before the war, was highly contentious. 
  
 Despite all these warnings, and the reservations contained in other 
 leaked documents from the same period, President Bush already had 
 reason to believe, as he awaited Mr Blair's arrival at Crawford in 
  
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