In the second part of his review Lee Gordon describes how international law was flouted as the Allies marched towards the Iraqi city of Fallujah.

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

THOUSANDS of families were trapped in their homes without food, water, sanitation or medical help. At night the low-rise city of Fallujah, famed for its mosques, echoed to the thunder of heavy ordnance. Nicholas Wood’s book ‘War Crime or Just War?’ highlights once incident later explored on television.
A US F-16 warplane targeted a group of fleeing civilians, killing more than two dozen. The cockpit recording was later broadcast. “Impact! Oh dude!” exclaims the pilot as the cockpit computer shows the tiny figures obliterated.
Four year-old Ali lost most of his family, left-leg, left-arm and part of his genitalia. My friend and I evacuated him to a Baghdad hospital for life-saving treatment. In the car his cries were muffled as his father cradled the little, bloody bundle, using his body to shield Ali from snipers. Ironically, after months of care in Italy he was sent home to Fallujah just as the assault in November unfolded.
Contrary to international laws during the attacks Fallujah’s hospitals were cut off and bombed. During the April assault snipers picked off civilians, medics and ambulances, deliberately preventing doctors from evacuating the wounded, many of whom died in their homes. Ambulances and medical supplies were prevented from entering the city and for several days the only medicines getting in were smuggled by my friend and I using our press credentials to circumvent checkpoints.
What I saw contradicted US and British denials of fair play, that ambulances were never targeted, and that the ceasefires were respected.
My friend and I – helped by British, American, Australian and Iraqi volunteers – manned the last ambulance and took sniper fire.
The image of a smoking ambulance with a bullet-ridden body of a doctor hanging from the back, is one I shall not easily forget. Even as US commanders declared a ceasefire for peace talks I watched a nurse wearing Red Crescent overalls shot by a sniper as he unloaded wounded from the ambulance yards from me. The nurse died half an hour later as doctors battled to save him using Boot’s painkillers I gave them for an anaesthetic. Despite the UN citing these reports as part of the “credible allegations that the Coalition Forces have been guilty of serious breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law” and warning 90 per cent of the dead were non-combatants, Blair was never held to account.
The use of cluster bombs and radioactive depleted uranium in civilian areas was one of the most serious breaches of international law.
The press has long reported the widespread use of cluster bombs against civilians by British and US forces. Though their use in civilian areas is indisputably illegal under the International Criminal Court statutes, the Geneva Convention, the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the Ottawa Mine Ban Treaty, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon was allowed to insist otherwise. “Cluster bombs are perfectly legal,” he said. “They make the battlefield safer for our armed forces. That is not something I am prepared to compromise.”
When it was put to him that the Iraqi mothers whose children were killed by cluster bombs might not thank the British, he replied: “One day they might”.
The effect of cluster bombs is almost impossible to imagine. They are designer anti-personnel weapons meant to kill or maim soldiers. Typically a large bomb detonates in an airburst scattering hundreds of bomblets, each of which explodes in a storm of shrapnel.
The whole effect is to hit an area the size of several football pitches with hundreds of thousands of pieces of deadly shrapnel capable of slicing through a man’s body – or a child’s.
Time and again mothers told me how the weapon effects children more because they are often caught in the streets as they play.
Across Iraq there are posters warning of the brightly coloured anti-personnel mines – so attractive to children – which some cluster bombs spread, each designed to blow of a feet and hands.
Misan, a typical village on the outskirts of Basra in southern Iraq, was struck by a cluster bomb as British troops advanced on the area.
Like villages across the country the walls are pockmarked by shrapnel, cars turned to sieves. Dozens were killed and scores wounded by the single explosion, most of them children.
Those who survived have shrapnel embedded in them and arms and legs missing. In a Baghdad suburb a child showed me the grisly consequences of a cluster bomb, pointing to what looked like grass growing from a wall.
Closer inspection revealed it was a young man’s scalp, which had been shorn off and thrown against the wall by the force of the shrapnel.
A doctor explained how some shrapnel is coated with agents that force surgeons to amputate limbs they might otherwise have saved, while other bombs are packed with plastic shrapnel designed to be almost impossible for surgeons to detect and remove.
‘War Crime or Just War?’ shows how numerous instances of torture and mistreatment by British troops have been similarly glossed over or blamed on low-ranking soldiers. The British Army is belatedly investigating scores of such cases under military regulations but the media has not pursued the use of International Criminal Court, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Hague Convention, the Nuremberg Tribunal Charter or the Geneva Convention, which implicate the government.
In southern Iraq I have come across cases in which prisoners were allegedly strangled, attacked with dogs, had eyes and hands removed and even castrated, the body returned by British troops with the genitalia stuffed into its mouth.
It remains to be seen whether these lead to calls for political heads to roll. The privatisation of Iraq’s economy, illegal under a range of international laws, is one of the most abiding consequences of the war.
Iraq’s industry and banks were privatised into the hands of mainly US companies – most with ties to the White House and the Pentagon – at a stroke.
Though millions were thrown out of work and industries brought to their knees, it provoked barely a whimper from the watchdogs in our media.
For hospitals the consequences were especially catastrophic. In Baghdad’s Medical City, the largest hospital complex in the Middle East, doctors told me of the disastrous results.
Supply of oxygen, used to keep patients alive during operations, was suddenly handed to the private sector sending prices spiralling.
Cash-strapped hospitals found they could no longer afford to buy enough oxygen to keep theatres open more than a couple of days a week and patients were routinely sent home to die.
Ambulances, which used to be maintained by the state, were sent to private garages for repair.
When I tried to move a badly wounded patient – shot through the neck by troops – I was told there was only one functioning ambulance in the whole of Medical City because a garage had impounded the others until it was paid for repairs.
Such crisis are faced daily by Iraqis. Nicholas Wood and Anabella Pellens have produced what ought to be a defining blueprint to hold Blair accountable. Had this been another war – waged by an African regime say, the media would have clamoured for heads to roll. But Blair is safe in Number 10 so long as the dinner party etiquette prevails in Fleet Street and Iraq is judged to be a just war.

• War Crime or Just War? is available from local bookshops or South Hill Press, 20 South Hill Park Gardens, Nw3 2TG.