With the use of cluster bombs, depleted uranium and targeting civilian areas for bombardment in Iraq, Tony Blair has flouted international laws and should stand trial says peace campaigner Nicholas Wood. Lee Gordon spoke to him

War Crime or Just War?
by Nicholas Wood
South Hill Press, £8.99

WITHIN half-an-hour of meeting Nicholas Wood he was in tears. I mentioned – truthfully – that I had wept over his book on the Iraq war and he suddenly folded, sobbing.
Not that he is an emotional man, indeed this was the first time that he had cried for years. But retired architect Mr Wood was profoundly disturbed by the war – the same reflex that led millions to protest, scores to go to Baghdad as human shields against the invasion and the parents of servicemen to take on Tony Blair. Mr Wood shelled out thousands of pounds from his savings to publish a paperback accusing Blair of war crimes, and his co-author Anabella Pellens spent months researching the international laws that ought to be applied.
“War Crime or Just War?” is an indictment of Blair’s war, setting out to prove the government guilty of breaking our most cherished laws – those flowing from the International Criminal Court and the Nazi Nuremberg Trials, the Geneva Conventions, Red Cross protocols and United Nations charters. Crucially, it points out, the legal principals of joint enterprise that make Blair and co equally responsible for US war crimes, the most prominent of which he catalogues.
That there is a prima facie case to answer ought to hang like Damocles’ Sword over Blair, especially in an election year. But the media has shied away from putting Blair’s head on the block, regarding the spectre of war crime trials a step too far.
So it was particularly brave of Mr Wood to spend more than £4,000 producing 4,000 paperbacks to raise questions the media ought to have pulled the government apart over. But then Mr Wood, a keen amateur archaeologist who describes himself as an Arabist, is not exactly a typical member of the awkward squad. He fell in love with the Middle East as a student, helped restore some of Baghdad’s fine colonial buildings in the 1980s and then watched stunned as they were blitzed in the 1991 Gulf War.
From the moment you approach the flat in South Hill Park, Hampstead, that he has shared with his wife Sara for more than 40 years his strength of feeling is clear. Anti-war posters are taped to its huge bay-windows. Inside Middle Eastern artefacts hang from the walls between family photographs and an eclectic mix of model aeroplanes and knick-knacks. His study is piled high with books on the Middle East and international law indicating the depth of his research, and boxes of his books clutter rooms awaiting sale. It’s a far cry from the sort of offices where journalists or court officials might have worked to put together the same case Mr Wood and Ms Pellens outline in their book. But after two years of letter writing and campaigning Mr Wood realises the media follows its own unwritten code – a kind of dinner-party etiquette: Don’t mention the war crimes.
“I was so frustrated that this issue has been shoved under the carpet,” said Mr Wood.
“Even at dinner parties where I’ve started to talk about the war, my wife, who is just as angry, has had to kick me under the table to shut me up because it’s uncomfortable for the other guests.”
For him the issue of the war was straightforward. He doesn’t like bullies – especially bullies that get away with it.
“Our armies had all this power – tanks, missiles and aeroplanes against peashooters,” he said. “It’s not like World War II when we faced an equal army. I remember the Blitz – hiding under the stairs from the bombs, watching the Luftwaffe pilots swoop so low over the houses you could see their faces – so I can imagine how the Iraqis felt. But Blair is an armchair bomber who knows nothing of war or the Arabs, and who has probably never been further east than his holiday home in Tuscany.
“I used to believe the International Criminal Court would hold Blair to account but after writing dozens of letters I realised it won’t. What we need is a Nuremberg trial for Blair.”
Would he like to see the guilty swing? “I’d like to see Blair stripped of his £3.6m home and for it to be given to an Iraqi family who lost everything,” he replied.
The case set out in the book is compelling. It points out for instance that the US assaults on the city of Fallujah last April and in November mirror the collective punishment meted out by the Nazis. In reality the April assault was a brutal attempt to tame a city the size of Bristol, which had remained proudly autonomous under successive regimes.
But the Pentagon claimed it was in response to the murder of four American mercenaries. The killing of the mercenaries followed bloody provocation by US marines. Taken at face value then the Pentagon was guilty of one of the bloodiest reprisals of modern times. International Criminal Court statutes, the Geneva Convention and Red Cross protocols were ignored as up to 1,000 civilians were killed and thousands more injured, orphaned and made homeless by the indiscriminate use of weapons.
Under joint enterprise Blair’s government and the British military, which supported the attack politically and logistically, are equally culpable. Fallujah was a turning point in the war, shattering the last vestiges of support for the Coalition among Iraqis and opening the door to a new wave of Islamic insurgency.
• Next week Lee Gordon gives his eyewitness account of the slaughter in Falluja.