It is exactly 62 years to the day since the remaining leaders of the Nazi forces stood in a specially built dock in the city of Nuremberg for the beginning of the now famous war trials. The Judge who oversaw the proceedings, Judge Jackson, was in no doubt as to the importance of the task that lay ahead.

Jackson told the court on the outset of the hearings “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.” So it was understood that Nuremburg was to be an example of how war criminals were to be tried and that it would set in stone the rules for international law, which we ourselves must abide by.

Not a single Nazi was handed down a death sentence from Judge Jackson for the killing of Jews. Not one received a hangman’s rope for indulging in genocide, rape, pillage, and the plundering of Europe. Jackson decided that if the trials were to be of any value then these supreme criminals would stand accused of the “supreme international crime”. That supreme crime was “aggression”, which according to Jackson “encompasses all of the evil that follows”. This perhaps was the reason why Jackson gave us all a warning concerning “the poisoned chalice” that we ourselves may have to drink from by applying the Nuremberg standards to our own actions if the proceedings were not to be heralded as an utter farce.

So here we are 62 years later. In the light of the Downing street memo, which told us all how the Government of Tony Blair wanted to “sex up” the case for war with Iraq, George Tenant’s admittance that false information was allowed to be presented to the US congress in the push for war, and the publication of telephone conversations between Spain’s Prime Minister José Maria Aznar and George Bush, who assured him there was going to be a war whether or not there were WMD’s; one is left asking a few simple questions. First, if the Iraq war was not an act of aggression then what was it? Secondly, why are those who acted aggressively against the Nation of Iraq not standing in the dock in Nuremberg to sip from the “poisoned chalice”? And third, how many more lives will be needlessly lost before we have the courage to put them inside that dock?