David Irving speaks at Alvin, Texas, on November 29, 2003.

THE OPENING BOMBARDMENT of targets in Baghdad in April 2003, the new millennium’s first Oil War and act of naked aggression. The unprovoked Western attack on Iraq began with a deliberate flash-bang display of over-dazzling pyrotechnics for the benefit of the broadcast media: At the command of his “neo-Con” advisors, US President George W Bush hoped to “shock and awe” the enemy peoples into surrender.

Half a million Iraqi civilians died in Bush’s 2003 war. The American commander dismissed questions, saying, “We don’t do body counts.” The war turned ugly, as partisans (renamed “insurgents” by Washington) rose from the sands and fought back against overwhelming odds. Using methods undreamed in earlier conflicts, women who had lost their men and families to the superpowers donned belts of explosives and introduced a new phrase, “suicide bombers,” to the horrifying glossary of war.

On April 11, 2003, The Washington Post revealed that US troops had discovered David Irving’s flagship work, Hitler’s War, in the bedside reading of Saddam Hussein’s deputy, the Oxford-educated Tariq Aziz. It relates how the Soviet people rose in 1941 to defeat the mightiest invading army on earth – by an insurgency. (Thanks to protests from the Anti-Defamation League, Irving’s book had been withdrawn from the libraries of the famed US military academies at West Point, Annapolis, and Colorado Springs.)

DAVID IRVING is the author of many books on wars, war crimes, and those who commit and prosecute them. His book Nuremberg, The Last Battle, told the inside story of the International Military Tribunal, based on private diaries and papers, including exclusive papers made available by the family of the chief US prosecutor, Robert H Jackson – “one of my idols,” says Irving: “A lawyer and idealist. He thought you could litigate an end to all wars of aggression and lived to see his Government prove him wrong.”

Video by Jon Gentry