More Presswork 5

Legal hurdles to war
are rightly demanding
our newspapers have carried some useful commentary on
the Chilcot Iraq Inquiry. Eastbourne citizens who marched against the war in February 2003 will note this with interest.

Our claim that the UK was probably being dragooned into an illegal War of Aggression is now common currency. Thus we find Keith Newbery, (“Our Culture of Secrecy”) writing that “Enough evidence has already emerged to indicate Tony Blair may have led this country into an illegal conflict.”

Meanwhile, Ian Lucas, “Teflon Tony does it again”, follows the same line but makes light of the illegality issue. It doesn’t matter, he says, because “it has happened anyway”. He goes on to write that, “We need to be concentrating on the moral case for this war, and learning from that lessons about what would happen in the future”.

So it’s morality that matters rather than the law? Do we really believe this? Something is illegal precisely because it is immoral. For most of us if a thing is illegal, you just don’t do it – or you take the consequences. We certainly don’t say that you can forget the law because something is done and dusted. No criminal could make a successful argument for this in court.

This matters very much when we come to the laws of war. The Nuremberg Tribunal concluded that: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences … affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression … is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

This is a firm principle. Applied to the invasion if Iraq it is difficult to find a single international lawyer who thinks it was lawful. So much for Ian Lucas’ observation that, “whether it was illegal or not … won't be proven in international law”.

Even so, we should not be carried away by the media habit of demonising one man – in this case Tony Blair. There is a case to answer; but it is the principle that matters. The legal hurdles to war are rightly high and demanding. We ignore them at our peril.

George Farebrother, Secretary,

Gazette, Wednesday , February 19

Letters to the Editor

Gazette, Wednesday May 5 2010
Not in the business of pie in the sky

RE: "Peace walkers welcome the Flame of Hope" (Gazette, April 14) provided a generous account of a response to an imminent danger which still threatens us all – the continuing deployment 23,000 nu-clear weapons in the world – many of them still on hair trigger alert.

The press release sent in by Eastbourne for Peace and Liberty highlighted the Flame of Hope's basic demand: for negotiations to abolish them to start now.
The Gazette piece, however, said "They want world leaders to abolish all nuclear weapons immediately". This shows a misunderstanding.

There is a big difference between the two. Immediate abolition is a naive demand as well as being phy-sically impossible. Getting the ball rolling by starting negotiations this year is realistic and achievable. It is also a legal obligation under treaty and a ruling by the World Court. The end result should be a globally binding Convention, within the next ten years, banning the production and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.

Eastbourne for Peace and Liberty is not in the business of pie in the sky. Even former Cold War veterans like Henry Kissinger are calling for all nuclear weapons everywhere to be scrapped. This demand is echoed by a growing number of world political and military leaders. The local support for our South Coast Flame of Hope also confirms this.

But abolition needs political will and will be long hard slog.

We hope that Gazette readers, after all these years of living on the edge of catastrophe, are now ready to support this vision.

George Farebrother,
Summerheath Road,Hailsham