Caroline Lucas (Green Party MEP)

It is fantastic to see so many people here. There are 400,000 people here and believe me the newspapers and the television cameras aren’t going to be able to hide the size of this demonstration today. And we are hear because we know, and we want to send a message to Tony Blair, that war on Iraq would be immoral, illegal, dangerous and wrong. And it will be even more wrong now that Saddam Hussein has said that the weapons inspectors can come in. Of course, Bush and Blair say that they don’t believe Saddam Hussein, well they don’t want to believe him because this war is not really about the access of weapons inspectors, this war is about the access to oil. But of course, they can’t admit that so they feed us all kinds of lies. We are told for example we have to go to war to enforce UN resolutions and the rule of law. It’s fascinating to watch this sudden newfound interest in the rule of law. Where was that interest when it comes to Israel withdrawing from the West Bank, or when it comes to China withdrawing from Tibet, or when it comes from another 101 examples, the list goes on and on ? And while they are so suddenly concerned about international law perhaps they would like to recall that no UN resolution gives any permission for the continual bombing raids on Iraq which continue to kill hundreds of innocent people day in, day out, week in, week out. But it’s a sad fact that the currency of UN resolutions has been seriously devalued. Please don’t be fooled into thinking that is UN support is given than that means that somehow this war is somehow legitimate. It is still grossly illegitimate. In order to get agreement from the UN for the first Gulf War the US used bribery, it used blackmail, it used threats and it will use them all again. And then we are told that we have to go to war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator. Well, I have no doubt that he is a brutal dictator but how has he been allowed to become one and equipped to become one? The answer is that the West has been systematically arming him for years. We armed him for his war on Iran in which more than a million people were killed, we armed him even when he was using poison gas to kill thousands of Kurds at Halabja. So another message that we want to send to Tony Blair today is that; we find the enormous hypocrisy of the Bush and Blair position utterly obscene. And then the next lie that we have to go to war is that we have to go to war to destroy Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Well let’s be clear; our moral authority just might be a little bit more if we ourselves did not have weapons of mass destruction. This government, Tony Blair has said that he will be willing to use nuclear weapons first, Israel and Pakistan have weapons of mass destruction but somehow that’s alright because for the minute apparently they are our friends. And the US has more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world put together and it has used them; in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, in Vietnam. And finally, they want to strike against Iraq to restore international peace and security in the region. How do they think that unleashing war can possibly restore peace? How is it that the 23 million people of Iraq have been reduced to just one man, Saddam Hussein? How is that our leaders have so little imagination that they cannot feel what it would be like to be a child in Iraq, living in terror and fear? How is that we hear so little about the consequences for the people on the wrong end of our missiles or our cluster bombs or our tanks and munitions? Experts speak about collateral damage, but that is an obscene term to cover the dying, the bleeding and the heartbreak of young people. (I’m being wound up now), so the final thing to say today is that we want to say loud and clear today that each and every one of those Iraqi lives is every bit as valuable and every bit as precious as every UK life. And we are here to say that you cannot enforce international law by braking international law, you cannot bomb your way to peace – that is the position of the Green Party, that is the position of all of us here, thank you for being here we will make a difference!