[This message was sent by journalist John Pilger to the October 22 Sydney protest against the visit of US President George Bush.]
This demonstration, and our anger, is not simply directed at a foreign politician we don't like and like to poke fun at. It's directed at the criminality of George W Bush. In attacking Iraq, Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair and PM John Howard broke every rule of international behaviour and every convention of international law.
To call them war criminals is not to take a cheap shot. It is to speak the truth. In 1946, the judges at the Nuremberg war crimes trials said that unprovoked aggression against another state was, and I quote, "the supreme international war crime because it contains all the evils of other war crimes.
There is now no doubt that at least 10,000 civilans were killed in Iraq by Bush and Blair's forces, backed by Howard. If you count the Iraqi teenagers conscripted into the army, the figure is probably more than 30,000.
That's 30,000 lives destroyed needlessly the criminals Bush and Blair and their accessory, Howard. We must tell these war criminals that, regardless of the trappings of their power, they are criminals, and they must be brought to justice.
From Green Left Weekly, November 5, 2003.
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