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John Valder's speech to the July 18 Public MeetingImpact of the Bush – Howard – Blair Invasion of Iraq a post June 30 assessment
I want to direct my remarks to one single aspect of this whole catastrophe unfolding in Iraq. I want to talk about how we plan to take that issue of Iraq and how we go about deterrence. It is now undeniable, sad though it is, that the invasion of Iraq was based on a false assertion and is an act of outright aggression by the world's most powerful nation, supported only by Britain and Australia. As such it is one of the greatest military atrocities of our times. We all know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and others were killed and maimed inside their houses or in the streets, and untold damage and destruction has been done to their country by the Coalition of the Willing. There's no getting away from this. The receding dates, the passage of time, the distortion of propaganda and explanation, all cannot evade the original, basic facts that this was an aggressive invasion of the state of Iraq, unprovoked, and as we know now totally unwarranted. So it is quite fair to say that the invasion of Iraq was a violation of international law. The question I want to address is: should the perpetrators of the Iraq invasion be punished, and if so, how? My wife Kay does voluntary work in prisons, where she comes across all sorts of criminals, many of them petty criminals serving gaol sentences for one thing or another, some are relatively minor. It is worth remembering the fact that some of our forbears were convicts were caught stealing and doing other things, and being transported here was considered fair punishment. I believe that the only deterrence for the repetition of the Iraq invasion is punishment in some form as war criminals. I appreciate the applause. In most private quarters where I circulate, when I mention war crimes, there is a shock - horror. People whisper, they think I'm going a bit far. In my opinion, the simple fact is that Bush, Blair and Howard, the three leaders of the Coalition of the Willing, committed an enormous crime. If they get away with it, others will continue to follow their example. You and I would be punished for speeding, or stealing or some other petty crime. We do normally get fined, or sent to gaol. The purpose of the punishments is to deter a repetition of the petty burglary or whatever crime it may be. We all go along with that idea of deterrence. You see it all day, every day, on the road. Now if there was no deterrence, we would go out and do whatever we want to do and there would be no penalty, no punishment, no deterrence. Now it simply follows that if for political leaders can go and attack and liberate another country in an act of mass terrorism, there will never be peace. I have been in the habit of liking this invasion of Iraq to a house invasion, where you or I might suspect our neighbours to be up to no good. I take it onto myself to force an entry of the neighbour's house, beat them up, kill a few, and then search for evidence of what they were up to. And in the end I find there is no evidence. What would happen to you or I? Obviously we would be arrested and put on trial for serious charges, including murder. But the invasion of Iraq is just that sort of thing on an absolutely grand scale. The tragedy is that this act of aggression has not been undertaken by some minor third world country, but by the greatest power in the world, the United States of America, supported by Britain and Australia. If the invasion of Iraq had been undertaken by some minor power, the first people thumping the table and demanding sanctions and various action to restrain it would be the United States, Britain and Australia. That should just remind us that the behaviour of the leaders of those countries in their invasion of Iraq is more reprehensible and more unforgivable than ever. Just how we are going to go about providing this sort of deterrence I just don't know. Surely in this modern global world, with its much wider education, it shouldn't be impossible to devise a way of fixing some system of penalties on world leaders in the same way we accept for our minor crimes. The task of doing this is made all the harder because the perpetrators of this new crime are the United States, Great Britain and Australia. Bush, Blair and Howard have to accept that they are war criminals and deserve to be punished. |
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© Walk Against the War Coalition 2003. |
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