Verses ‘by’ classic
POETS DISPLEASED
by the Iraq War, by Bush, by Blair and by the Iraq inquiries
plus
“Done in the Bush” and “The Blair Affair”
by
Nigel Stuart

This anthology was inspired by the smashing of international law by ‘President’ George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair with the illegal invasion of Iraq. By this they laid waste the frail fabric of peace and order, for which millions of men and women lost their lives in the second, and worst, of the World Wars.

With incredulity, I watched as my country, and the generous-hearted people I had come to know over years of working for one of the best of America's free institutions, were smeared with the blood-guilt of these smug and dishonest men - sullied with the casually wasted lives of an innocent and victimised people - the men, women and children of Iraq.

Like millions of others I had always treasured the decent outcomes of 1945 - international law, the Nuremberg Principles and the United Nations - and I contemplated the bloody consequences of a criminal war of aggression with heart-break and with anger unassuaged. The realisation that, behind this, there lay many decades of Western hypocrisy, exploitation and complicity with Middle Eastern oppression, was but a shamefully familiar addition to the offence.

Then I recalled that the disregarded millions of us could, as Paul Dehn had shown more than forty years ago in his collection Quake, Quake, Quake — A Leaden Treasury of English Verse, writing of the nuclear threat, share our outrage with the voices of our culture; that together we could vent our anger and stoke our resolve never to falter until these war criminals, their servants and corporate masters, are disowned, displaced and brought, like others before them, to book. In time, at an International Court at the Hague - but, for the present, even in this book - and now.