John Pilger: An Inquiry Into A Slaughter

Credible research shows that up to 10,000 civilians were killed in the attack on Iraq, together with perhaps 30,000 Iraqi soldiers, many of them teenage conscripts. A slaughter. These people were killed by weapons designed to reduce human beings to charcoal or to shred them. The British Army littered urban areas with cluster bombs, while the Americans did the same and in greater quantity, adding uranium-coated munitions, whose radiation poison is ingested with the desert dust.

In my experience, the unseen deaths are far more numerous. Today, malnourished children are dying from thirst and gastroenteritis because the world's biggest military machine, including the British, fails to restore power and clean running water as its most basic obligations require.

This carnage, wrought in an unprovoked illegal assault on a sovereign country, is a crime by any measure of international law: be it the United Nations Charter or the Geneva conventions. The "supreme international crime", the Nuremberg judges decided, was that of unprovoked aggression, because it contains "the accumulated evil" of all war crimes.

Blair has committed this crime. He shares responsibility for causing violent death and suffering on a vast scale, which the web of deceit spun by his courtiers has failed to justify. His co-conspirators in Washington care nothing about this; only their ascendant power matters. In their concentration camps, at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram in Afghanistan and Baghdad airport, there are no human rights, no recognizable rule of law, no justice. In this Kafkaesque world, people "disappear" while others, charged with nothing, plead for their lives. In the meantime, on the streets of conquered Baghdad, an elite US unit acts as a death squad, shooting people as they drive by.

In Washington the other day, I asked John Bolton, Under-Secretary for International Security at the State Department, the most outspoken of the "neo-conservatives" around President Bush, about civilian deaths in Iraq. I referred to the study that estimated up to 10,000 casualties. He replied: "Well, I think it's quite low if you look at the size of the military operation that was undertaken."

Quite low at 10,000. Puzzled that he should be subjected to such a line of questioning, he said with a laugh: "You must be a member of the Communist Party."

Norman Mailer recently broke the great silence about the true direction of Bush's America when he wondered if his country had entered a "pre-fascist atmosphere". In Washington, I put this to Ray McGovern, a former senior CIA officer, distinguished as a Soviet specialist and cold warrior, a man who counts himself a personal friend of George Bush, the president's father, who said: "I hope [Mailer] is right, because there are others who are saying we are already in a fascist mode... when you see how this war [on terror] is being conducted."