When "guilty" becomes "sorry"

Anglo-Saxon Alliance invent new precept as counter-weight to international law

A new precept has taken shape in the international community, that of the Anglo-Saxon Alliance using the public apology as an excuse for its wrong-doings and inventing the logic-defying notion that although they were wrong, they were right.

First it was the British prime Minister, Tony Blair, who declared at his Labour Party Conference that he could apologise for the wrong intelligence but not for the attack against Iraq. Next, it was Rumsfeld, who could not bring himself to say sorry, but who told the Foreign Relations Committee that the intelligence reports on which the casus belli was based were wrong, and the argument that the Iraq question was linked to international terrorism was wrong, then trying to justify everything by claiming that Saddam Hussein intended to produce WMD.

Now it is British Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, who stated yesterday on BBC Question Time that "I certainly want to say that all of us, from the Prime Minister down, are very sorry. "(We) apologise for the fact that that information was wrong, but I don't think we were wrong to go in."

The principle that a person can apologise for being wrong and then claim that he was right, defies logic. This is not the case of taking someone's pen by accident and returning it later, with an apology. This is a case of the most flagrant disregard for international law, an outrage against the international community, against the rule of law, against the UN Charter, against the Geneva Convention, in which an act of mass murder was committed.

If the casus belli was based on two precepts - that the government of Iraq had WMD, posing an immediate threat to the USA and its allies and that the government of Saddam Hussein had links to international terrorist organizations and both precepts turn out, by the admission of those who crafted the case for war, to be utterly false, where does this leave those responsible?

Sorry? Or guilty?

Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Blair, how do you plead to the charge that you attacked Iraq illegally, outside the auspices of the UNO, and without any casus belli?

Sorry!

Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Blair, how do you plead to the charge that you are responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent civilians in the said attack?

Sorry!

Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Blair, how do you plead to the charge that you are responsible for the wounding and occasioning of grievous bodily harm either with intent or through criminal negligence, to tens of thousands of innocent civilians?

Sorry!

Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Blair, how do you plead to the charge that you purposefully targeted civilian structures in Iraq with military hardware?

Sorry!

Messrs Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Powell and Blair, how do you plead to the charge that you based your actions on a tissue of lies from beginning to end, that you knew fully well what you were doing, that you jumped the gun because you had wrongly started a military build-up on Iraq's borders based upon false assumptions and did not have the decency to admit that you were wrong?

Sorry!

Sorry is not good enough. In all countries, common criminals who are found guilty, even those who admit to their guilt, have to stand before a court of law and face the consequences of their actions.

A vote for the regimes of Bush and Blair is a vote for the rule by the mob over the rule of law. In short, it is a vote for international terrorism, a vote for the continuation of terrorist acts such as those carried out by US and British military forces against civilians. Terrorists and war criminals must be tried, judged and if found guilty, punished. Why should this clique of elitists be treated any differently?