Vietnam

The great American reporter Seymour Hersh is at war with the American military over his j’accuse in the New Yorker that a much-lauded general, now a member of President Clinton’s cabinet, ordered his troops to fire on retreating Iraqis on the eve of the Gulf war ceasefire in 1991.

In the week that Parliament was manipulated by the Government and denied a proper vote on whether Britain should join the Bush gang in its assault on Iraq, many thousands of people will converge on London in what is expected to be the greatest demonstration against war for a generation.

Civil disobedience is the sole path left for those who cannot support the Bush-Blair pact of aggression. Only then will politicians on both sides of the Atlantic be forced to recognise the folly of their ways.

They have blown off the limbs of women and the scalps of children. Their victims overwhelm the morgues and flood into hospitals that lack even aspirin.

A man cuddles the body of his infant daughter; her blood drenches them. A woman in black pursues a tank, her arms outstretched; all seven in her family are dead. An American Marine murders a woman because she happens to be standing next to a man in a uniform. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but the chick got in the way.”

“We had a great day,” said Sgt Eric Schrumpf of the US Marines last Saturday. “We killed a lot of people.”

The unthinkable is becoming normal. The saving of one little boy must not be a cover for the crime of this war and we should not forget its true horror.

The White House sets the tone and the media echo a line that celebrates the victimhood of the invader and the evil of the Iraqis. And then London takes its cue.

Writing in the Daily Mirror, John Pilger identifies the root cause of the bloody bombing of the UN compound in Baghdad, which Washington and London have blamed this on ‘extremists from outside’.

Blair and Straw dare to suggest that the millions who have rumbled the Bush gang are simply being “fashionably anti-American” – another desperate act by desperate men.