[WOMBAI]

Originally Posted by bananarama

Are not terrorists who blow up trains with civilians on board not war criminals. Yet none of them are called to be tried as one.......Blair may be guilty of a major political misjudgment but a war criminal is something elese......

I wish people would spend more time and energy calling for real war criminals to be brought to justice......

I wonder if that would be your attitude - if a son/daughter of yours had died fighting his 'false' war!

[Shasown]

Originally Posted by bananarama

Are not terrorists who blow up trains with civilians on board not war criminals. Yet none of them are called to be tried as one.......Blair may be guilty of a major political misjudgment but a war criminal is something elese......

No terrorists arent, they are simply criminals, unless of course the situation later escalates into a war. Then they could be called to account for their actions at a later date if their action could be considered to have helped cause the war, In which case they may charged with crimes against peace. Simples.

For a war crime to have been committed there needs to have the legal state of war as defined in the Hague Convention, UN charters , Geneva Convention and a few other internationally legally binding documents.

Invading a country, simply because you didnt like the regime, under the false pretext of removing weapons of mass destruction the other person may have is definately a crime against those international conventions, Given that they had been bombing Iraq for a while prioir to the invasion, it would be down to lawyers at the Hague and the UN to determine if Blair was to be charged with crimes against peace or war crimes or in the ideal world both.

I would say its also a tad hypocritical for Blair and Bush to go in to remove WMD's from Iraq while having highly developed WMD and enough research to turn your own pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries into biological and chemical weapon manufacturing in a couple of days themselves.