George Bush has said: “It will be no defence to say: ‘I was just following orders.'” He is correct. The Nuremberg judges left in no doubt the right of ordinary soldiers to follow their conscience in an illegal war of aggression. Two British soldiers have had the courage to seek status as conscientious objectors. They face court martial and imprisonment; yet virtually no questions have been asked about them in the media. George Galloway has been pilloried for asking the same question as Bush, and he and Tam Dalyell, Father of the House of Commons, are being threatened with withdrawal of the Labour whip.

Dalyell, 41 years a member of the Commons, has said the Prime Minister is a war criminal who should be sent to The Hague. This is not gratuitous; on the prima facie evidence, Blair is a war criminal, and all those who have been, in one form or another, accessories should be reported to the International Criminal Court. Not only did they promote a charade of pretexts few now take seriously, they brought terrorism and death to Iraq.

A growing body of legal opinion around the world agrees that the new court has a duty, as Eric Herring of Bristol University wrote, to investigate “not only the regime, but also the UN bombing and sanctions which violated the human rights of Iraqis on a vast scale”. Add the present piratical war, whose spectre is the uniting of Arab nationalism with militant Islam. The whirlwind sown by Blair and Bush is just beginning. Such is the magnitude of their crime. — John Pilger, ZNet Magazine

The looting of the National Museum of Iraq, a repository of treasures from civilization’s first cities and early Islamic culture, could be a catastrophe for world cultural heritage, archaeologists and art experts said on Friday.

“Baghdad is one of the great museums of the world, with irreplaceable material,” said Dr. John Malcolm Russell, a specialist in Mesopotamian archaeology at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston.

Though he and other scholars of antiquities were alarmed by the reports of looting, they were not surprised. They said they feared the next cultural target could be the important museum in Mosul, a northern city that is also in turmoil. The Mosul museum holds many Assyrian artifacts from the nearby Nineveh ruins. NY Times

Russell was choking up at times while interviewed today on NPR. He was elated by comments from Colin Powell he interpreted as an endorsement of the notion that the U.S. has a responsibility to protect and retrieve the antiquities. He was a little defensive when the interviewer asked if one should be upset about art treasures in the face of the enormous human losses, but remained composed and adamant. This is potentially the worst destruction of antiquities since the burning of the fabled Library at Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, he said, and challenged us to grieve for more than just the loss of life in the Iraqi conflict.

US authorities had been warned that this was coming.

For weeks before the war, archaeologists and other scholars had alerted military planners to the risks of combat, particularly postwar pillage of the country’s antiquities. These include 10,000 sites of ruins with such resonating names as Babylon, Nineveh, Nimrud and Ur.

Cites U.S. Iraq War Precedent: ‘Defence Minister George Fernandes reiterated Indian warnings that Pakistan was a prime case for pre-emptive strikes. “There are enough reasons to launch such strikes against Pakistan, but I cannot make public statements on whatever action that may be taken,” Fernandes told a meeting of ex-soldiers in this northern Indian desert city on Friday. The renewed warning came just hours after US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington would strive to cool tensions between nuclear enemies Pakistan and India, who have fought three wars since 1947.’ Agence France-Presse